The JISC-funded Repository Support Project just put up a list of repository-related weblogs, organized by type of authorship.
I’m embarrassed to say how many of these I didn’t know about (I’m on a mass-subscription kick this very moment!), and very grateful to JISC for undertaking this. Such things as this foster the community of practice repositories and their staff need so very badly.
(I ought to have blogged the “what are new people doing?” and “if you had a magic wand…” discussion, but I am running outta steam here.)
Karen Brown, Dominican University. “Libraries and the Scholarly Process.”
Building on Judith Nadler’s talk. Things happening in libraries in support of scholarship; also challenges.
Three considerations: resources and materials, the scholar (and the process of scholarship), the institution (of librarianship). “Clouds” as metaphor coming up a lot.
Resources: the library provides systematic cataloguing/classification of materials. The way this is done hasn’t kept pace with current applications (e.g. Web 2.0). You used to have to know LCSH to get anywhere with your search, but that’s changing. We’re also starting to use visual metaphors, clouds of related terms, to help navigation (e.g. AquaBrowser). Learning how to help browsing, amassing resources, navigating the universe.
Personal information clouds: increased expectation to take your tools and resource access with you (mobiles, wireless networks, collaboration/sharing). How do we enable this in libraries? “Seed the clouds” to get info to people who need it.
Clouds of collaboration: large-scale projects, infrastructure investment, huge funding issues. Example: Making of America project. No one institution can do these things alone!
Q: Cloud is pretty from without, “debilitating fog” from within. So who is it that’s making the associations in AquaBrowser? How important is it to expose the identities of the cloudmakers? A: AquaBrowser works with subject terms as well as terms you add as you do your search. You end up with a mix of controlled and uncontrolled subject terms.
Greg Jackson, University of Chicago IT.
Free-associating reminds us that things we think of as new really aren’t. 25 years and four jobs ago, head of Educational Technology Center, working out how to use computers in schools. Controversial but interesting project. Why did/didn’t it work?
Project Athena: same questions as ETC, but different technology and more resources. Now? Opportunity to reflect on these questions again. Many policy questions revolve around copyright, which are threatening serious effects on scholars’ use of raw materials.
Under what circumstances should we think about things as following stage progressions? (To get to one stage, you go through previous one; you don’t regress.) If you organize process around this, it’s all about moving people forward on a determined path. Thinking about technology in scholarly work tends to presume a stage progression. Presumption is that until you do the simple stuff, you can’t think about the advanced stuff.
Different way to think about it: we are always facing choices. The choice set varies, but you have an everpresent array, and there isn’t just one path through.
An interesting thing about Bamboo is that it’s caught on like wildfire, and it’s really engaging people. Why? Because it’s interesting from a transactional-analysis point of view. Often, we get an “I’m okay—you’re not okay” viewpoint, where the technologists are automatically okay and anyone who’s not paying attention to technology isn’t. These interactions produce pathological results.
But is it just the techies doing this? A professor at UC complained that students weren’t paying attention in class because of open laptops; requested wireless turned off. Response: it won’t work, because there are other connection modalities. Response: this is not a technical problem, it’s a classroom-management problem, so cope! This is another “I’m okay—you’re not okay” transaction! I want what I want, I don’t care what you think, and if you don’t agree, you’re full of it.
Not okay/not okay transactions: Tech exists that works, but isn’t even slightly creative and doesn’t change the educational process. E.g. basic course-management system. Increases efficiency, but it doesn’t change a damn thing; both sides are thinking “I don’t really know how to do this, but I have to do something.”
Bamboo is different; all sides are trying to understand each other. Sometimes it feels like we’re talking with idiots, but no, we’re talking with smart people saying idiotic things; we have to pick through that and get into the other side’s head (why don’t they think it’s idiotic?).
Goal: getting to “I’m okay—you’re okay.” Releasing the potential we all suspect is there, in this interaction of tech and the humanities.
(This has been quite a long day, but it hasn’t felt long. Very involving conversations all ’round! I think a lot of people have had the experience of re-valuing people and practices they hadn’t known about or hadn’t thought much of. That’s a fantastic outcome.)
Table 1. Intellectual networking/self-interest; fieldwork/folklore. Listed out traditional networking processes (conferences, institutes, seminars, humanities centers, individual contacts and mentoring, etc). Eventually mailing lists came about, and they were different: enabled lurking (which is no good at a conference!), non-networking networking. Newer networking practices (undergrads and younger grad students): always in the network, multitasking with one task being networking, networks start at an early age and carry over across educational contexts, bigger networks than young scholars had before. In learning-management systems, networks are brutally cut off at semester end because of FERPA; conversations end abruptly. In networks outside university contexts, this doesn’t have to happen. No strong evidence of these networks among current-gen humanities scholars, but will probably happen.
Fieldwork/folklore. Collect a lot of data, but only a small amount of it ends up published/cited. Where does that primary material go? No incentive to collect/organize it, arrange it for IR, but IR doesn’t know what to do with it without that organization! Sciences notion of “waste data” that’s of use to someone else. E.g. Hubble telescope images captured incidentally, while tracking from one part of the sky to another, not useful to PIs, but useful to someone else! Not a practice of sharing data collection in the humanities (”if I go to Amsterdam to look at my stuff, I don’t ask anybody ‘hey, I’m going to Amsterdam, is there something I can look at for you?’”).
Table 2. IP/creation of new works. Talked about distribution too. Humanities consume IP to produce IP (e.g. media studies). Bamboo should push fair use hard and aggressively. What is the best approach? Model licenses, “bill of rights” (proclamation “we the scholars believe we have these rights to use your materials…”), e.g. use without permissions, non-exclusive digitization rights. Whatever Bamboo does needs to be open (source). Could be like JSTOR or DLF; pay-to-play, or RedHat Linux model (free to use, support costs). Google is aggressively digitizing stuff from the global south, stuff needing digitization for preservation purposes, but it’s the usual exclusive license; deal with the devil? are we being scooped by Google? can Bamboo help, by digitizing stuff in a more open and equitable manner?
Libraries/universities as publishers. Will they stand behind faculty who publish riskier (vis-a-vis IP) materials? How will they respond to cease-and-desist orders? IRs should be easier to use and operate!
Table 3. Delivery/presentation/dissemination. What is the architecture needing development to make things accessible? Indexing, search, scanning, delivery, flexibility. Assume that architecture exists; what does delivery mean? Building interfaces to resources based on target audience. Packaging relevant to content and audience. Information visualization!
Dissemination: assuming we want to reach a wide audience, it should be possible. Multiple delivery vectors. Simplifying access. Cheap access!
Presentation: networking techniques involving technology, e.g. Second Life, sharing slidedecks. Long-distance collaboration. “Interfaces” includes Google Earth tricks (Rumsey Maps). Is Bamboo a self-contained software stack, or a collaboration among developers of many different tools? Either way, you want connections/hooks into other technologies (such as 2.0 tech).
Serendipity: Pure luck in discovering something you weren’t looking for. Open to discovering unlooked-for possibilities throughout the Bamboo process. Tools exist already that facilitate this (clustering search engines, SemWeb stuff). Bamboo = slime mold!
Table 4. Creativity/recreating past methods. What does creativity mean? New discourse contexts, new products, new strategies; new forms of creativity. Related verbs: moving around, adapt, play, react, test, re-mediate, repurpose, experiment. Sometimes you have to be saturated with info to do this; sometimes you have to be expert. Limits and inspiration to creativity: technology, context, having a problem. Creativity killers: technology, form, control, isolation, pressure, no pressure, audience, rules.
What should Bamboo do? Figure out how to make tools that enable productive play without wasting time.
Recreating past methods: to understand what you’re looking at. Recreate an environment (e.g. of a play performance, of another culture or time). Recreate context (intertextuality, relations between art and politics, historiography). Recreating a model. Eventually, we become the past; how do we make transparent our work to those who come after us? Contextualized archiving, documentation via social tagging.
Table 5. Discovery. Of what? texts, images, objects (what we study), people (in communities, to network with), archives, tools to work with. Tasks: google, read, search, follow citations, etc.
Archiving and “data hygiene.” You expect what you work with (primary text editions, etc) to have certain levels of quality; what is good enough? If it’s not good enough, who can fix it? Allow users to help, but are they skilled enough, and who judges their corrections? Distributed Proofreading as model. Add metadata/tagging to add value.
Archiving issues: versioning. what should get archived? what does an archivist do? IRs versus dark archive vs. OA archive. Preservation and format migration.
Table 6. Social connections. Social networking. Building, contributing connections. (Reprise of academic social practices.) Status, trust, and respect in established and sustained connections. Role of leadership.
Enrichment. Adding value. Enriching content, for ourselves and others. Visualization, annotation, pattern recognition, digital surrogates and how they help us enrich content. Discovering, adding new knowledge vs. adding new methodologies.
Table 7. Public/community involvement. Maybe not all that common? What does the community do? Folksonomies, meaning-making, disambiguation, putting things in context, changing the public sphere. Would like to see: two-way processes, removing barriers to public involvement in classroom contexts, libraries, etc. Connecting to community to make our work relevant. E.g. internships, oral history, service learning, surveying, offering work for sale. Is the connection with the public discipline-specific? More incentive in some disciplines than others. Does engaging with the public make work less valuable academically? Facilitating delivery, discovery, participation by academics and public.
“Smashing.” All had it in common! Literal and figurative. Questioning established forms of publication. Promotion and tenure. Boundaries (academia/public, disciplines, teaching/research/service, teaching/learning, faculty/staff, faculty/student relationships), perceptions of library and IT, hegemony of print.
“Confessing stupidity.” When can you do this in the academy? Feedback loops for improvement. Accountability, learning from mistakes, exploring dead ends (where is the “journal of null results”?). Need authentic, meaningful peer review; very challenging to do, to receive, to get people to do. Acknowledging boundaries of knowledge.
What do we want, in the end? Reflective practice, continuing engagement in process. Submitting non-traditional materials in tenure and promotion packages. Taking risks. Re-evaluating how we provide feedback. Celebrating mistakes. Collaborating across boundaries. Being involved in peer review and critique. Exploring new forms of publication and distribution. Giving stuff away!
Four/six, John Laudun, University of Louisiana
Folklorist on English faculty: finding intelligence and beauty where no one expects to find it, expanding the historical and archeological record on what it is to be a human being. Current research: duck boats (land/water).
III.4: “For the humanist, the library is his/her laboratory, the place in which is found or hidden the raw materials of research.” His reaction: the library is not raw! The world is raw. 75% of the world isn’t anywhere near a library, never mind the scholarly record—that is rawness. 75% of our lives is bills! So much of the world isn’t in records, not in any library or archive or museum.
Library as place from which he draws data and into which he puts products. No. Instead: putting in notes from fieldwork, in audio/video form as well as text, and he wants infrastructure so these data can appear in libraries finally! The new-media landscape lets him capture this, lowering the cost of production/documentation. Ordinary people can produce broadcast-quality work. Beyond notion of “multimedia” (the more the better) to expanded, more flexible production that fits your topic, without broadcast media’s constraints.
Presentation available online.
Q: How do you see your role now that many of the people you study can produce their own work? Are you becoming more meta? A: Becoming more of a collaborator. Engaging students in projects and conversations instead of passive knowledge inculcation. Really what he likes!
Q: Does this materials put different demands on the library vis-a-vis preservation and access? A: Yes. Some of this material has to be access-restricted, at least for a time. Courtesy to subjects, not just IP questions. Increases the number of stakeholders and the layers of things to think about. Interesting circular process: as they gather/curate stuff and increase access to it, it makes us uncomfortable, but people are also bringing us stuff and then examining and reusing it themselves.
Q: What do you think about what libraries call collection development and collection management? We might not want to restrict access. A: He’s as confused and torn as everybody else by that. Realizes he ought to meet with campus librarians more often; they have their own culture, passions, and limitations. Is going to go home and make that appointment! (Applause.)
Good chat over breakfast about the role of libraries in the research process, NEH grants in the digital humanities, Sophie and TK3 and NightKitchen (ah, the ebook days of yesteryear!), etc.
Judith Nadler, Library Director, University of Chicago Library. “The Library as Partner in Research and Scholarship: The Case of Bamboo.” On first reading the Project Bamboo proposal, thought it was a miracle: we could all see ourselves in it, and it was clear that the library could be deeply involved. Libraries have much to bring to Bamboo, and learn from it. The library brings a history of partnerships with scholars in building, describing, preserving, and serving information (key mission of the library!). Acquiring and selecting content, making spaces for storage and use of collections, involvement in mass digitization. Content management and digitization: describing and organizing, offering access, archiving and preserving. Service models: help desks, user education and instruction, faculty outreach and consultation.
Models of sharing and collaboration that may be helpful to Bamboo: coordinated collection development, interlibrary loan, shared physical storage, cooperative description, collaborative systems development (yeah, I’m not so sure about this one), collaborating with faculty.
Facing the future: exposing hidden collections, decentralizing resource-control and metadata creation (devolving some of it onto non-librarians because we can’t do it all), finding new collaborators (including via 2.0 approaches such as tagging), using new and emerging technologies better.
What we can learn from Bamboo: New roles for the library, e.g. are we just content repositories, or content validators? New tools and services we can offer (new collaborative tools). New content types (aside from the traditional publishing stream). New outreach models and services (e.g. IP expertise).
Biggest benefit of Bamboo: maximize the value of collective expertise! Instead of “build it, and they will come,” let’s “build it together.” (What a great formulation. I will be borrowing it. Often.) Too often, we’ve built and nobody’s come; this will be different.
(Agenda overview.)
Exercise: On a good day, what do you (as a humanities researcher) productively do in service of research? How about during a longer period of time (semester, term, year)?
(Great discussion at my table, but I’m holding out to participate rather than blogging.)
The meeting reception, complete with string quartet and tasty tidbits, featured Mellon’s Chris Mackie and Mark Olsen of ARTFL. My after-the-fact recollections follow.
Chris (dressed in, um, a charcoal-gray suit, white shirt, and conservative tie—and the mere fact that I of all people mention this might just be indicative of, um, something) answered a few questions about Mellon’s involvement with Project Bamboo.
Mellon has been asked many times to put a list of all their funded projects on their website, pour encourager les autres. Mellon can’t do that, because most of those projects don’t exist any more; they didn’t transition to a sustainable funding or support model after the Mellon money ran out. That is part of the impetus behind Project Bamboo: to put such projects on a firmer footing by having the right people (IT and librarians as well as scholars) in from the get-go.
Why were Chicago and Berkeley chosen as the first Bamboo institutions? Because they already had multiple stakeholders inside the institutions talking together about humanities-computing issues. Mellon’s paradigm for funding projects is to jumpstart programs with their money that then become sustainable on their own. Chicago and Berkeley looked like good places to start.
What Mellon wants to avoid is more unsolicited proposals (nota bene: they don’t fund unsolicited proposals!) corresponding to the pattern of the Canonically Bad Humanities Proposal. The CBHP goes something like this: “We have a bunch of stuff that at least one humanities scholar is interested in. We want to digitize it. We want to put it on the Web. We want open access—that is, we might want open access except open access sounds like a commie plot (I LOLed, I really did), but it might catch on, so we want to keep the option available. We want to completely reinvent the wheel; you’ll notice that our proposal takes absolutely no cognizance of anything that has ever been done before in digitization. Give us lots and lots of money, Mellon!”
Mellon has a unit that funds things like this (although they prefer that the projects be important to more than one scholar!). But the CBHP comes up so often that it’s dead obvious we need better models for getting this work done. Moreover, the reward structure in the humanities militates for the CBHP; to get a digital project valued at all by a tenure or promotion committee, the PI has to be the only PI, because these committees have no idea how to value less prominent contributions. This needs to change too.
Chris asked all participants to answer three questions: “How does Project Bamboo benefit me? How does it benefit my institution? How does it benefit my discipline or profession?” Altruism is not a sustainable base for this project. If it’s not perceived as personally and professionally beneficial, it won’t fly.
Olsen’s brief talk spoke of John Unsworth’s humanities primitives, and asked whether “similarity” might be such a primitive. He demoed the potential of n-gram comparison tests for establishing similarities among texts (I couldn’t help remembering that horrible project from the Department from Hell where we were doing exactly this by hand for various adaptations of La Celestina), and posited that similar statistical tests of similarity could work for images, videos, and sound as well.
I’m afraid I’m in a Thénardier hotel—one of those hateful places where everything, including the Internet, costs extra. I have a synchronous online commitment tomorrow evening, so I’m going to wait a bit longer and then buy one day’s access, so that it’ll cover my appointment. Then I’ll log on and post this.
Jim Franke, UChicago joint appointment, including running a humanities institute. Word of welcome! Talking about partnerships with other humanities-institute folks to work on interdisciplinarity, thinking about disciplines, and how that fits with Project Bamboo: dynamic relationships among disciplines, content of disciplines not fixed; universities haven’t reflected that dynamism, instead proliferating small fiefdoms. Humanities centers might be good campus partners in innovation and change!
(rundown of agenda, logistics)
First section, two questions for table-by-table discussion: “What do you hope Bamboo will accomplish?” and “Given what you’ve been hearing, what questions do you have about Bamboo?”
(introductions around the table)
A1: Want to see Bamboo touch all the stakeholders, including publishers and aggregators, scholarly societies. Need a laundry list of these stakeholders! People who haven’t gotten into the room, work with these orgs as a group, rather than one-on-one. LEVERAGE. Make them play ball!
A2: “Pub conversation” learning things by accident. How can those conversations happen more often and more systematically? Working with technophobes—how do I talk to them about how I can help them do their work better?
A3 (me): I feel underutilized. Because of my checkered background, I have a grab-bag of skills to offer that A&H people say they need, but I can’t make the connections. How do I make people aware what I can do, willing to take advantage of my services? How do I tell my higher-ups that I need to get out of the library into the community?
A4: Intersection of these sets of people, as public-services librarians. How do we develop services to support what researchers are trying to do? We’ve been slow in doing that.
A5: Central IT has not been supporting the research community for 15 years at our campus; how do we change that? Where are shared needs, and how can shared services address those needs? A&H are the have-nots on our campus; how do we change that?
A6: Curious what will happen. Research focuses a lot on work practices, why people do or don’t do what we want them to do with technology. Tools: Why isn’t there an iTunes for articles? Seems buildable! We’re 3/4 of the way there. How about recommenders (quality/use indicators), to deal with info overload?
A7: Folklorist, not “high culture” type. Strong public orientation. Bamboo needs to pay attention to humanistic materials. Because the materials are often not inside universities, universities let them slide. Nobody to count, describe, make available, digitize these collections. Organizing holdings cross-institutionally. Dealing with closed collections.
A8: Publisher; why is he the only one in the room? A lot of academic publishers are talking about these questions. Why can’t Bamboo engage that parallel conversation, bring it in? Libraries and publishers are talking, but NOT libraries/publishers/faculty. We need that triumvirate! If libs are going to branch out into production/publishing, faculty need to come into it. With IT in the background as a facilitator. Do humanists want to be “efficient/effective?” Is that the goal? Can the tech reproduce the “productive inefficiencies” of humanities studies? How does tenure connect into all this; very important to him as an editor. None of the stakeholder groups can determine how tenure will work by itself. But we have to talk about how to value this stuff vis-a-vis tenure!
We want useful efficiencies (e.g. in discovery process); we also like unique materials, things that nobody else is working with! Tension between finding whatever one wants and finding material that moves ideas in interesting directions and often gets buried. We don’t want to spend hours and hours sifting through haystacks! Because we want one thing, we may want its opposite too. Working out competing desires.
Publishers have to be on board for some things to happen, e.g. exposing metadata. We are impoverished if we leave them out.
What is effectiveness? Is it machinelike, or is it enabling you to do what you want to do the best way? Example: finding verb usages in paper versus electronic text.
Some A&H people are in full retreat from technology; they get sad and upset when told that models are changing. How to tell them that the world is moving with or without them? How to help them look forward?
What’s a “productive inefficiency”? Mind-numbing gruntwork, triggering a creative thought process, which wouldn’t happen if you’re just creating. For some people, you need the resistance between the mundane and the creative to do the best work. Unintended consequences of the speed at which work occurs. Do we think in a different way? Does it short-circuit thought processes? Example: transcribing texts by hand instead of OCR; only half of mind on work, other half freewheeling.
Dissertation: lots of side trips during the research process. Drafting threw them all away for a time, and then some got added back in—but all those distractions were necessary! A lot of these serendipitous experiences are replicable digitally (e.g. vague Google searches turning up odd results).
Connections? Theme in department reaccreditation hearings: everybody has to rethink what their standards are and what their dissemination modes are. Have to legitimize digital formats in addition to traditional ones. UPresses are getting hit economically, and are not willing to crank out “tenure books,” universities without presses are freeloaders on those with, what about audience? Economic model of UPresses is altering. On one hand, opportunity to present work in different formats; on other, shrinkage of traditional outlets.
What presses/societies are talking about: how to produce digital books, how to get over the hump? Establish electronic series, grabbing up important scholars first so that young faculty can feel comfortable publishing.
What about graduate students? Where do they fit in? At MPOW, we want to bring grad students into the conversation. They’re the next wave; we want to grab them now. Some graduate students are very forward-looking, not Luddite at all! What they know can even spread to faculty. But you can’t assume they’re more technical. In LIS we face this problem constantly. Base tech level of techie students has gone up, but the low end is still very low.
Good to hear from students whose desire to do digital work shut down by hostile departments. What about info literacy training, too? What level of digital familiarity are we going to assume from our students in the future, as opposed to what we’ll teach?
What communities is Bamboo going to impact? Faculty, grad students, undergrads? IT as training partner. Undergrads have to be taught how to do research; what we’re doing is breaking down research into its components. If undergrads don’t know how to do research, can they contribute to Bamboo discussions? True, but we want to make sure we pay attention to the impact on them, and recognize that they’re already pushing the boundaries.
What are the publics for Project Bamboo? What aren’t? Performing arts hits the whole public. Scholars pull material from everywhere. Commonalities between us and eScience, perhaps the small sciences? Maybe Bamboo will touch a lot more disciplines, because of interdisciplinarity. Do we have enough interdisciplinary types in Bamboo? What kind of technical needs will come up, as projects interbreed disciplines?
Hard to know what the audiences are (looks like everybody right now!) until we narrow down a bit more what we’re talking about. Some of us don’t need new tools; we need help doing the work of making what we have available. Some of us do that kind of labor, and need projects! And who knows what we could do with cheap undergrad/grad labor that was digitally aware?
I want Bamboo to open all the doors so I can do whatever I want, and not find “their software” a barrier. Metasearch, no more competing interfaces. Don’t want Bamboo to be a barrier, new standards. But I’d rather have a silo than an unscoped universe of stuff most of which I don’t want. Bamboo can’t be so inclusive that the tools are dumbed down to uselessness, or unusable within specific communities.
(Pulling the larger group back together.)
Chad Kainz, UChicago, and David Greenbaum, UC-Berkeley. Both responsible for shared-data and IT support services at their respective institutions. Rich Meyer, logistics. Sara Ware, event coordinator.
84 institutions globally participating in Project Bamboo; “exceeded our wildest expectations”
Thanks to Mellon Foundation for funding “how we can make it easier for institutions to support the work that goes on in the arts and humanities;” the way to do that is through conversations.
Ida Noyes Hall, once the women’s student union. Now, career placement services, School of Business stuff.
Bamboo Project is thinking about the world we live in, the projects we do, and realizing that it takes a lot of different people to make everything work: IT, faculty, researchers, librarians, IS, etc. Problem of code that no longer runs; takes a lot of effort to sustain over the long term. Do we know what is possible? How have we been affected by e.g. Google (Books, Scholar, Maps)? Connecting our resources and knowhow with commercial services has enormous potential; what are the ramifications?
Central question: How do we work together to make it easier to foster innovation in the arts and humanities, through development of shared technology services?
(discursus on bamboo and how it fits as the project name: organic, flexible, sustainable, etc.)
“Arts and humanities:” intentionally broad scope; performing arts, history, philosophy, humanistic social sciences, etc. “advance research:” pushing for transformation as well as increasing efficiency and effectiveness. “shared tech services:” moving away from isolated projects and silos to shareable, reusable, mashuppable services; everything from massive shared-data stuff to the “wild west” of Web 2.0.
Cyberinfrastructure: three interlocking Borromean rings (Dan Atkins). Behavior/organizational science, users/communities of practice, IT. In the arts and humanities: common understanding of practices, directions, commonalities among humanists, librarians, technologists; shared tech services; models of organizations, partnerships, and social cooperation among the stakeholders.
Step one: workshops (this is the second of four). Step two: “Exploring Scholarly Practices” Sept 2008 at UC-Berkeley (roundup of workshop results). Step 3: identifying services.
Also building demonstrators and pilot projects: to explore commonalities, demo services, experiment with new app models, test ideas, promote collaboration among stakeholders.
Documents: workshop reports, finally a proposal for implementation.
Workshop structured to engage at institutional level. Each team from an institution has to have at least one A&H faculty member and one IT/library person; rest of team flexible. Organizational and industry participants are those with sincere interest in Bamboo, desire to promote academic innovation, desire to create sustainable models; they are here to explore relationships with funders, museums, library consortia, companies (e.g. Sun).
A lot of conversations have already happened, but usually in a siloed context; what Bamboo is doing is bringing those conversations together.
Success conditions: Understand A&H practices enough to design tech services. Create a roadmap for shared tech services. Identify priorities. Find organizational, staffing, and partnership models that enable these services to be sustainable and ongoing (e.g. “digital humanities center,” embedded tech inside departments, an extension of the library). Build a core set of institutional and organizational collaborators who will work toward the goals of Bamboo (”last folks standing,” can’t run an implementation project with 84 institutions!). Make opportunities for new collaboration.
(rundown of project leadership. Wireless is getting stressed, it looks like; I am closing unnecessary windows and services.)
Principles of community design to be used in Project Bamboo: “Listening tour” (Cohen, GMU), guided by framework of goals and a commitment to action; flexible over time based on what they hear. Create “upward spiral of conversation” (Broughton, UC-Berkeley). Translation between communities of practice, driving toward a common language. On tables is a page for adding terms to their glossary. Search for commonalities, but respect context and uniqueness. Define responsibilities of participant institutions, and implementation priorities. Create a “we,” not a “you/us.”
Q: what is to be implemented at the end of this process? A: whatever comes out of the workshop as opportunities to make tech more shareable, or enabling community collaboration, or helping people find opportunities to share. Could be lots of things. Maybe a web-services framework to expose services. We don’t know yet what the answer is! Depends on what we hear. How do we capture “what has been done” and help people know where and how to start? What standards and specs are relevant, important, worth supporting and sharing (APIs, discipline-specific standards and practices, etc)? Avoid reinventing wheels.
(There’s a dictionary-exchange standard kicking around somewhere! I didn’t know that. Anybody else?)
Q: Will Project Bamboo engage standards orgs, e.g. TEI-C? A: Maybe at the roadmapping stage, where we ask who’s been tackling these problems already… problem is that project plan changed after Berkeley workshop and will continue to change. They have already been in contact with someone at TEI-C.
Q: As workshops continue, will the desired participants shift? A: We have to get to a tech roadmap, so we frontloaded with faculty now so that we can grab the techies later. Also, easier to grab faculty now, when semesters are ending. Narrow participation list, but not exclude participants. They are thinking about how to manage virtual collaboration for this project, so that physical participation isn’t essential. Want to ensure that this remains an A&H-driven project throughout.
Q: Why not imagine a way for all 84, or 800, institutions to implement? A: We’re hoping to find a collaborative model allowing large numbers to engage. But at some point, we have to differentiate roles among partners; some will carry heavier loads and commit more resources.
Q: Six deliverables identified, process and timeframe set. But workshops change iteratively! How does that affect analysis at the end? A: Right now, what’s changing is the workshop series, more of a fine-tuning thing. After Berkeley, less emphasis on finding commonalities, more on respecting and learning about uniqueness. Sometimes unique doesn’t turn out to be, but you don’t know until you ask and explore. Start going through the data after the Paris workshop.
Q: What about audiences? Self-selected group so far. What other publics are involved? Broader public, public intellectuals, other communities who wouldn’t come to Project Bamboo. A: Grant talks about research, but definition of “research” quite broad. Several of us very interested in public side of teaching and engaging; it has been brought up often. If we do this right, we’re making models that help public engagement as well.
So here I am in Chicago at the Project Bamboo kickoff lunch, MPOW and the Project Bamboo folks having been extremely accommodating of my last-minute sneak in the back door. Because I’m paranoid about these things, herewith is my disclaimer: Project Bamboo is not paying me except in conference food, and MPOW pays me, but doesn’t pay me to blog. I made a nuisance of myself to come because I am very excited by and hopeful about what Project Bamboo is doing, and if I can help that along with a blog post or two, I’m perfectly happy to.
MPOW had a last-minute cancellation, so I am apparently filling in on its official slate of researchers despite the “blogger, Caveat Lector” listed as my affiliation. This is a slightly odd place to be, truthfully. I do write, I do publish, and I do research—after a fashion, in an applied and pragmatic way that a good many humanities scholars of my acquaintance would sneer at. I’ve also seen the research process from the publishing-services side, and as a librarian and an open-access advocate, I’m as steeped in faculty behaviors and practices as an outsider can be.
As voluble as I usually am, I may be keeping my mouth mostly shut for this one. If I can, I’ll contribute… I’m just not sure I’m quite the input they’re looking for. We’ll see.
For now, welcome to Project Bamboo!