The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent grant-making agency of the United States government dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation and public programs in the humanities.

We have recently launched the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI)--aimed at supporting projects that utilize or study the impact of digital technology. DHI is particularly interested in helping the development of cyberinfrastructure for the humanities as described in Our Cultural Commonwealth, the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure.

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) is a software engineering project that is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Under the direction of Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil and John Unsworth, the SEASR team is developing software that:

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

SEASR's software research and development environment will enable existing applications (e.g., Wordhoard; Nora; MONK: Metadata Offer New Knowledge; IMIRSEL: International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (i.e., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media, and even custom data). SEASR offers a range of data synthesis improvements, from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation.  

Lorcan Dempsey points us to an important draft report from the
Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control that emphasizes the crucial need to enable smart connections between currently separate silos of cataloging. Here's the heart of the project:

Different communities of bibliographic practice have grown up around different resource types: library collections of books and journals, archives, journal articles, and museum objects and images. As these resources and others become increasingly accessible through the Web, separation of the communities of practice that manage them is no longer desirable, sustainable, or functional. Bibliographic control is increasingly a matter of managing relationships—among works, names, concepts, and object descriptions—across communities. Consistency of description within any single environment, such as the library catalog, is becoming less significant than the ability to make connections between environments: Amazon to WorldCat to Google to PubMed to Wikipedia, with library holdings serving as but one node in this web of connectivity. In today's environment, bibliographic control cannot continue to be seen as limited to library catalogs. [Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control PDF]

Kristen Nicole (on Mashable) calls our attention to the relaunch of carmun, an academic, social networking, bibliographic, research space geared primarily at students, but also open to graduate students and faculty. Nicole describes it as "kind of like what Facebook meant to be until kids at frat parties learned the ease with which photos can be posted and shared." Carmun offers social bookmarking, study groups, social networking according to subject of interest, bibliographic reference management, and a research engine that will try look up any resources you identify at your own library. The list of university libraries at which it works is fairly long, and the way that carmun provides and promotes this functionality is a nice antidote to Facebook's apparent reluctance to let librarians build search applications for the Facebook platform.

The blog Friends:Social Networking Sites for Engaged Library Services recently described a new Facebook application called (Facebook) Librarian. One feature of the application is that users can go straight from Facebook to an array of research tools including Open WorldCat, Google Book Search, Wikipedia, etc.

This article from The Register is more evidence of the necessity for serious HUMAN control over at Wikipedia. After I checked out all the links from the article to wikipedia, I was dumbfounded.

Wikipedia is supposed to be a collectivist repository of knowledge, but the moderators have become so overwhelmed with duties and power that they are regulating their daily activities to the machines themselves...thereby alleviating themselves from a primary function, to think. In fact, the bot that Betacommand created on Wikipedia utilized the files created by humans to restrict human thought and behavior, the total antithesis of Wikipedia and academia.The sysop bot was editing Wikipedia and deleting members at breakneck rates. Their monitoring system did work to catch and eliminate the bot, but what is being done to correct any errors in judgment it may have had? Can they even determine what errors were made?

In the midst of all this, we are being repeatedly told by Jimmy Wales that academia NEEDS wikipedia, much like the military was told they NEEDED Skynet in the Terminator trilogy. I'm sorry, but I believe that people should think and computers should simply be tools.

I have one question for Tango.....if I write a bot, and that  bot creates a script to create another bot, can the bot implement the new bot? And can you have Essjay [or the resident Essjay bot] get back to me on that?