The 18-month Bamboo Planning Project was launched in April 2008 with a $1.4 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to UC Berkeley [1, 2] and the University of Chicago. More than ninety institutions and organizations participated in four kick-off planning workshops held from April through July 2008 in Berkeley, Chicago, Paris, and Princeton. Approximately 360 humanities faculty, campus information technology leaders, computer and information scientists, senior librarians, and others began by tackling a Herculean task: articulating current and future scholarly practices with an eye to how a consortium of institutions can develop shared technology services to advance research in the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences [3].
Hundreds of flipchart pages and reams of scribe notes were collected from table sessions, plenary discussions, and presentations. Scholars, librarians, and technologists described a dizzying array of practices and needs. Much of what participants articulated fits a "technology services" frame, including a federated, deep semantic search function across multiple archives; text- and data-mining; trusted storage, evaluation, and classification of digital artifacts; citation hyperlinking; and folksonomic tagging with identifiable levels of authority. Other needs surfaced at the workshops require an organizational, interdisciplinary, or political frame that might be supported by technology services, such as: a burgeoning interest in commons-based peer production of scholarship; social networking oriented to scholarly "lattices of interest" and expertise; and advocacy around legal and institutional policy, from the boundaries of fair use in law to authority and validation in the academy.
Project Bamboo's Workshop One data have been published for public review on the project wiki and are currently being assessed, summarized into themes of scholarly practice, and annotated with definitions and references to extant tools and standards (current, defunct, fully-defined, and works-in-progress). This collaborative, online effort will engage all who plan to attend Workshops Two and Three, as well as anyone who wishes to join Project Bamboo through online participation — whether affiliated with an institution or not.
Themes of scholarly practice will be collected in a report tentatively titled "Scholarly Practice in the Arts and Humanities: Foundations for Service Development", the first of several planning-phase deliverables. These practices will be filtered and factored into a technology services roadmap (another key deliverable). Community design and analysis driven by wiki-mediated participation, and ratified in Project Bamboo workshops scheduled for October 2008, January 2009, and spring 2009, will identify layers and domain areas in the services roadmap that chart achievable cyberinfrastructure deliverables for an implementation phase. The final workshops of the planning phase will refine and ratify the services roadmap, and define terms and membership of a consortium of institutions and organizations that intend to commence implementation in fall 2009.
We invite members of the Berkeley campus to both learn more about, and participate in, Bamboo planning via the Bamboo Community Planning wiki.
Notes
[1] UC Berkeley team leaders from IST:
- Program co-director: David Greenbaum,
- Program manager: Rich Meyer,
- Architect: Steve Masover,
[2] Bamboo Leadership Council members from UC Berkeley
- Berkeley Principal Investigator: Janet Broughton, Dean, Arts and Humanities
- Tony Cascardi, Director, Townsend Center for the Humanities
- Charles Faulhaber, Director, Bancroft Library
- Stuart Russell Chair, Computer Science
- Shelton Waggener, AVC-IT and Chief Information Officer
[3] Stan Katz, past president of the American Council of Learned Societies and participant in the final Workshop One instance at Princeton University, wrote a two-part article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about Project Bamboo's Workshop One.