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This wiki space contains archival documentation of Project Bamboo, April 2008 - March 2013.
Table of Contents
Penn State University, University of Iowa, Willamette University
Value of Bamboo (Atlas) to Librarians, Cultural Heritage Organizations, and other Content Providers
After fifteen years of digitization by libraries, museums, cultural heritage organizations and other content providers that has led to large scale-digitization partnerships, there is still a tremendous wealth of primary and secondary resources not yet digitized, or even processed to a degree that it is discoverable. Existing digital content is often difficult to discover, or made available through systems that may inhibit reuse and repurposing. However, these organizations, especially academic research libraries, will become more invested in supporting these communities of practice and their efforts to create and disseminate data. Their effective practice will depend upon the degree to which they are tightly integrated into the cluster of inter-institutional collaborations that enable the creation and use scholarly content. Going forward, stewards of these materials must make strategic investment choices about how they create and curate collections of digitized content, and those choices must be informed through a deep engagement with scholars in all disciplines.
The Bamboo Atlas should provide content stewards with evidence of scholarly engagement with digital resources, elucidating current trends and cutting edge research in the digital humanities and social sciences. The Atlas could identify communities of practice for which particular collections and services may have significant value and impact. The documentation of scholarly practices should also provide content stewards with insights that will assist them in designing and implementing services for the curation of digital humanities data, including the "refactoring" of content to work with tools and/or services supported by Bamboo. By using and contributing to the Atlas, librarians, archivists, curators, and faculty may jointly discover opportunities for local collaboration that draw upon and contribute back to developments within the wider Bamboo community. Perhaps most significantly, the Atlas could provide content stewards with an avenue for direct collaboration with members of the Bamboo Community to support the development of additional contextual materials or other value-adds to their existing collections.
In their use of the Atlas, stewards of cultural heritage materials will also be driven by the following concerns, and others:
1) Current practices are critical, but stewardship must anticipate the unanticipated needs of unknown and future users. How might decisions made today constrain scholars in the future?
2) Many members of this community exhibit contradictory behaviors. While stewards seek to improve access and use of their collections, they also may wish to control that access and use of the materials in order to protect their organizational interests, or to ensure that the context of the collections and resources are not rendered invisible when networked.
San Jose State University, CUNY Graduate Center, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dartmouth College
Value Statement about Teaching/Learning/Pedagogy for the Bamboo Atlas
Digital humanities work doesn't divide neatly into teaching and research categories. Rosemary Feal notes in a recent Inside Higher Ed column (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/05/26/digital) that one of the exciting aspects of the new digital projects being created is that they advance scholarship and create teaching tools at the same time. The development of a growing body of scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL) over the past decade helps us end the false dichotomy between teaching and research work. For digital humanities practitioners, teaching becomes the place where scholarship is practiced and modeled for students.
Digital humanities work, by its nature, focuses on multiple audiences: scholars, technologists, teachers and just as importantly, students (graduate and undergraduate). Moreover, while Project Bamboo will build appropriate digital humanities tools and resources to facilitate faculty and graduate student research, if we don't introduce those digital tools into classroom pedagogy and use them to improve teaching and learning, our audience will remain limited to a small portion of the higher education learning population. The way to overcome the false divide between teaching and research is to HEIGHTEN the visibility of pedagogy within that equation.
We believe strongly that research and pedagogy should not be separated in Project Bamboo, but rather integrated, through the Atlas, to take full advantage of the natural synergies that exist between the two functions and allow those synergies to emerge:
The Bamboo Atlas is the locus for the dissemination and discussion of related educational and curricular materials in the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences that can help faculty, students, library and technology professionals, and others to integrate emerging digital content and tools into research, teaching, and public service. The Bamboo Atlas can serve as a "Craigslist element" of sorts, to encourage individual scholars to discover and then share and improve on such pedagogical ideas and "services." Bamboo can then keep track of who is using the services and report on how that technology is being deployed for research, teaching, professional development, promotion, and grant proposals.
University of Louisiana, Lafayette
Value for scholarly / professional societies
The central focus of the learned society remains support of its members' pursuit of reliable knowledge and its effective communication within and without the society. Cyberinfrastructures expand the communicative modalities available to learned societies and their members. However, these same infrastructures threaten some of the most venerable revenue streams, emphasizing the importance of maximizing the return on investment in the digital realm. What learned societies need are at least interoperable, if not common, infrastructures that allow members to communicate and collaborate, in a trusted fashion, with other scholars, be they mutual members of the same society or in an adjacent field. By participating in a common technological ecosystem, learned societies can leverage their investment to give their members the tools and content they need to advance their own scholarship, and thus the impact of the society itself.
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Value to IT people who support digital humanities
I think the Atlas artifacts serve to document and help us learn about the range of scholarly problems, methods and practices that are typical for arts/humanities/interpretive social sciences faculty, including the language they use, the kinds of content they work with, the types of tools they use or might benefit from, the actual activities that comprise their work, and the like. This education for those of us new to trying to support the needs of that community is most helpful, and helps us better support our faculty by understanding typical needs and processes, helping us bring to bear resources from other departments or institutions or disciplines, helping us plan for shared campus needs, helping to plan for new LIbrary services and resources, and so forth. It lets us avoid starting from scratch in providing solutions to expressed needs.
A related value for IT and Library is it fosters a dialog with the faculty that may not have occurred prior to the campus involvement with Bamboo, it brings new connections and opportunities for partnership, it helps local faculty and institute/center directors and deans and the like see that they have an on-campus partner who cares about their problems and their general lack of resources to support their technology needs (at least on our campus this has been the case)."
University of Virginia
Help a faculty member find a tool they need, find out who is developing the tool, its strengths and weaknesses
The Bamboo Atlas will help faculty and students find tools to do what they want to do in their scholarly activities and lives (whether research, teaching, learning, service, engagement, networking, or publication); (ii) then assess each tool in terms of its functions, how broadly it is used in general, how extensively it used/being developed/being supported specifically within their peer micro-communities (locally, nationally, internationally, within institutions, disciplines, etc.), what the strengths/weaknesses of each tool are, and various use scenarios for its utility; and (iii) finally of course to actually chose a tool based upon the preceding and get as much information, support, and guidance as they can for their use of that tool.
University of Colorado, Boulder, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Local sustainability of digital humanities initiatives and local team-based support of humanities research
The Bamboo Atlas will allow local teams of humanities faculty and libraries and IT staff to tap into a rich network of disciplinary-based expertise, to connect with and learn from faculty and staff at peer institutions and professional organizations, and to bring that new knowledge to benefit digital humanities initiatives and humanities research on home campuses. All three groups - humanities faculty, libraries staff, IT staff - will gain direct benefit in three distinct areas: