Linking research & learning technologies through standards

SIF Association AU recently held a two day workshop for the Data Standards Working Group, which has been working for the past couple of years on the Australian data model and specification for SIF. These are some of the highlights of the meeting:

New SIF Association US Standard

SIF Implementation Specification 2.4 is going to be released in early June; a preview of the features to be included is already available. (See also Larry Fruth’s presentation (PPT) at the recent IDEA10 event.) The new release of SIF features new objects and attributes, including improved coverage of assessment and its alignment to curricula, and objects to support special programmes for staff and students (student participation, professional development). But there are two major additions in this version taking SIF in new directions.
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Reflections on e-Humanities workshop, Melbourne e-Research Scholarship Centre, 2009-08-12

Building generic ICT infrastructure to support humanities research seems to be a difficult task. The standard approach is to

1. collect a bunch of usage stories from different communities
2. infer common business processes based on those stories
3. build infrastructure that supports those business processes

The theory is that a community would then take the generic infrastructure and customise it to meet their particular needs. The problem is that there is something about the humanities that makes generic business processes hard to find.

We’ve blogged previously about the Project Bamboo approach to finding generic e-Humanities business processes. Project Bamboo certainly had difficulty converting its scholarly narratives into common recipes. Maybe there aren’t any processes common to the different strands of humanities research? Unlikely. Rather, the fierce independence of humanities researchers makes it difficult to infer commonalities. Suggesting to a humanities researcher that she might have a research process in common with her peers carries with it an inference that her research is not unique. Even uttering the phrase “business process”  can put humanities researchers offside (some of them conflate business and commerce).

In this context, there was a little nervousness leading up to the Interconnections and Services in the eHumanities: Reflecting on Current Initiatives workshop hosted by the University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre on 12 August.
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Project Bamboo is an Andrew W Mellon Foundation-sponsored project that aims to dramatically improve the way digital technologies are used in humanities research, with a particular focus on shared services infrastructure. The main participants are humanities departments and libraries in major US universities such as Chicago and Berkley, but overseas universities including Cambridge, Oxford, ANU and the University of Melbourne are represented.

Founded in March 2008, Project Bamboo has run five workshops to turn input from the e-Scholarship community into a proposal which it will submit to the Andrew W Mellon Foundation at the end of 2009. The proposal will describe a 7-10 year process, but will focus heavily on implementation in years 1 and 2.

As the project has developed, its thinking has evolved. The project began in more optimistic financial conditions, and implicitly supported a very wide agenda to be realised over ten years. This includes shared services, an extensive, ongoing business analysis model (scholarly narratives, recipes, activities in theme groups, and a marketplace for goods, services for labour (Bamboo Exchange). The project argues that with a solid service based infrastructure supporting reusable applications and tools across different institutions, the cost and effort of using technology in humanities research will be reduced, with many new benefits. With the current global financial situation, the project’s immediate scope has become focused on two parts:

• The Bamboo Services Platform is a cloud-based environment which will host shared services useful to researchers in e-Humanities. They will include existing services and applications re-engineered for the new platform, as well as novel services created to fill identified niches.
• The Bamboo Commons is a broad discovery mechanism that allows Bamboo participants to find Bamboo services, tools, business analysis – and each other.

Link Affiliates has submitted two recipes and is using the e-Framework to model solutions to the problems they pose. The e-Framework with its principled binding of services analysis to business requirements is well positioned to offer a structured approach to the problem of interoperability of services, tools, content and business processes within the digital humanities sector.