Scholarship for Web tools

http://www.suntimes.com/technology/guy/1215551,CST-FIN-ecol12.article

How could Web services help a professor studying medieval Chinese texts? What about a researcher trying to map particular scenes in silent movies to discover the director's style of movie making?  "Computers are already good at finding patterns, particularly in text," said Arno Bosse, senior director for technology in the humanities division at the University of Chicago. "It would be great if computers could also recognize people and place names in ancient Chinese texts or the types of shots made in a silent movie," Bosse said. The effort to develop such software, dubbed Project Bamboo, is being led by the University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley, and funded by a $1.3 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. From museums to libraries the 18-month Project Bamboo is being recognized as unprecedented in size and scope because it involves 100 institutions ranging from museums to research universities to national libraries to community colleges to small liberal arts colleges. The process is starting with workshops where professors and researchers talk about how they work, how they teach, the kinds of resources they use, and the kinds of tools and processes they'd prefer. Followup workshops will translate the recommendations into a plan.

Already, Web-based software such as WordHoard at Northwestern University applies text-analysis techniques to humanities literature to help find variants of spellings and words used in ancient Greek and early English writings. An aid for researchers In the future, a Web service might be invented for literature scholars that would instantly find passages closest to the one being studied from thousands of books published from the same period. Faculty and staff at the University of Chicago are working on a prototype of such a tool in a project called ARTFL (the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language). "It won't replace the researcher, but rather act as a powerful extension to his or her abilities," Bosse said.

Chad Kainz, senior director of academic technologies in the University of Chicago's Networking Services and Information Technologies unit, said academics need to take advantage of the tremendous computing power of virtualization, utility computing, Web 2.0 collaboration and other technologies. "We looked at the world around us and realized that in the commercial Web, we see the rise of 2.0 services, Google maps, project management tools and mashups of these technologies with wikis and blogs," Kainz said. "Why isn't that happening as much in the academic space?" Digital Humanities forum The University of Chicago, Northwestern University and the Illinois Institute of Technology are hosting a separate event, the city's third annual Digital Humanities Computer Science Colloquium, that will explore how existing technologies can help researchers, scholars and computer scientists do their research. The event will take place at the University of Chicago Nov. 1-3. Meanwhile, professors are getting are figuring out how digital technology is affecting their careers. More are asking how digital scholarship fits into the tenure process, and whether digital scholarship is as valued as analog, Kainz said.