FAS - Federation of American Scientists

Harnessing Virtual Worlds for Arts and Humanities Scholarship:

A Planning Project

(Start Date: December, 2007)

URL:  http://www.fas.org/blog/mellon (temporary)

Project Goals:

In recent years, scholars in the arts and humanities have begun to embrace emerging technologies to overcome persistent obstacles and advance their research. New generations of technologies are already on the horizon, promising further capabilities to help arts and humanities scholars address important research questions.  One such technology is next generation virtual world (VW) platforms. VW platforms have already been used to enable experts from higher education, museums, and the performing arts to collaborate in creating persistent simulations of objects and sites that played a key role in the history of art and culture. VW platforms may also permit entirely new dimensions of scholarly communication, overcoming barriers to communication and collaboration among humanistic disciplines and between the humanities and sciences.

These potential scholarly payoffs of VW-based inquiry are predicated on the possibility that VWs can generate “conceptual collisions,” as previously disconnected knowledge sources and research techniques are brought into contact.  Such conceptual collisions, and the sustained research and learning opportunities in them, hold great promise for advancing scholarly work in the arts and humanities.  With them, VWs become a remarkable new platform for advancing humanistic and other scholarship; without them, scholars may have few or no sustainable incentives to use the technologies. Our long-range objective is to explore the question of whether these conceptual collisions in fact exist, and in sufficient quality and quantity to drive sustainable scholarly interest.  The best way to find out is to build a VW, populate it with projects that are highly likely to generate such collisions, and observe and analyze the results.

Our 8-month planning project is intended to convene a series of three summit meetings that will bring together leading international humanities scholars, digital humanities researchers, college and university IT staff, digital library experts, and experts in VW technologies.  The objectives of this project are (a) to establish a coalition from among the participants that is committed to building and using a VW-based digital research environment to address a set of interesting and important research questions in the arts and humanities, and (b) to formulate a set of design requirements for VWs that are highly likely to create conceptual collisions that illuminate important research questions in arts and humanities disciplines. In addition to the learning generated by the summits, the cumulative result of these sessions will be a proposal for a virtual worlds project having the potential to frame and inform further work and scholarship across the humanities.

Leading Institutions: The Federation of American Scientists and SRI International

Project Highlights:

The goal of the first two-day summit will be to introduce and demonstrate several candidate VW technologies to the participants, discuss the ways in which the technologies could support scholarly endeavor, and generate a “long list” of humanistic fields, questions, and topics that might be fruitfully addressed through VW-based research.

The second summit will assess the long list of potentially interesting and important research questions that emerge from the first summit, as well as any that have been identified in subsequent conversations, with the goal of identifying a prioritized, shorter list of challenges that hold the greatest promise for progress though interdisciplinary collaboration in VWs.

The third meeting will have two goals: (1) to establish methods and criteria for evaluating the quality of scholarly communication and collaboration that occurs in the VWs; and (2) to detail the functional requirements, investigator roles, and estimated costs of a development and deployment plan in the form of a proposal for funding that can be presented to suitable philanthropic sources.

Milestones and Deliverables:

Planning for Summit 1—to be held Feb 16-17— is complete.

The next Summits are planned for April 9-10 and May 13-14.

The Final Report is due August 2008.

Community:

Thirty-five scholars from across the U.S. and other countries will attend the meeting at SRI International in Menlo Park, CA.  The following categories of scholars, researchers, and technologists will be represented at the summits:

Ø      Distinguished senior humanities scholars.

Ø      Scholars who pursue technology-related humanities projects.

Ø      Researchers who are actively participating in a 3D visualization project.

Ø      Scholars and developers of online environments for research and learning.

Ø      University academic and research support experts.

Ø      Computer scientists and others with expertise VW applications who can provide pertinent technical insights.

Sustainability:

The project will be sustained through the establishment of a coalition of scholars, researchers, and developers who will jointly submit a follow-on proposal for funding presented to suitable philanthropic sources.

Marketing/Evangelism:

We have a project wiki to capture our work and build on the summits.  We will use appropriate listservs, blogs, virtual worlds and other scholarly networks to invite interested parties to participate in our work through the wiki.

Synergy with other projects: 

We would like to find synergies with projects that are developing tools and platforms for scholarly collaboration and communication, content management, data mining, visual and auditory digital representation, and learning.