Project Bamboo presents humanities use cases at Virtual Organization workshop

Keith Hazelton of U. Wisconsin - Madison and co-chair of the Internet2 MACE-Dir working group represented Project Bamboo at a workshop in Utrecht, The Netherlands last week on Virtual Organization Architectural Middleware Planning (VAMP). While most Virtual Organization work in the United States and abroad has focused on scientific domains of scholarship, there was strong interest in bringing humanities use cases to the table as middleware experts from the U.S. and Europe considered research needs that ought to drive development of common infrastructure on which university communities can depend.

Keith presented a slide deck jointly authored by himself and Steve Masover (this post's author), and presented it in a morning session on 6 September on Virtual Organization (VO) Use Cases.

After introducing Project Bamboo and giving an overview of the project's ecosystem (see embedded diagram), the presentation covered two principal use cases:

1. Obtaining digital content from heterogeneous repositories, and presenting the content normalized to an extent that permitted application of differently-sourced content to the same tool(s)
2. Vetted curation or annotation workflows, in which contributors, editors, and primary editors each influence the creation of a collaboratively built "edition" of content overlaid with corrections and/or annotations, and each individual's contributions are tracked and credited

The slide deck also covers some of the mechanics of bringing people into the ecosystem by assigning them a Bamboo Person identity that may be associated with multiple user accounts possessed by a person through her campus or through social media vendors (e.g., Google, Facebook, Yahoo).

The slide deck is available as a PDF, available at this link: Identity in Humanist Workflows.