Please join us in welcoming two new additions to the Bamboo DiRT steering/curatorial board over the last couple months!

Kristin Williams works on digitizing an archive on dissidence in the former Soviet Union at the Global Resources Center of George Washington University. When not trying to figure out how to digitally represent archival materials, she tracks down research questions with an international bent and tries to identify ways in which the library can evolve in a digital world to better serve the scholarly community.

Jonathan Armoza works for Google as a Technical Account Manager, and part-time Engineer for Google’s digital humanities efforts. He has Bachelor’s Degrees in English Language and Literature from the University of Washington in Seattle, and in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. In his current position, he helps Google develop their digital humanities work, and acts an intermediary between them and the academy.

After nine months of gathering feedback and making adjustments, Bamboo DiRT is out of beta starting today, thanks to the hard work of the curatorial/steering board.

• Josh Honn developed the new site design, which lays the groundwork for a future update to projectbamboo.org.
• Chad Curtis has been working on cleaning up DiRT’s “license” taxonomy, and keeping the site’s software up to date.
• Jody Perkins has eliminated inconsistencies in the “developer” taxonomy, and cleaned up the “tags”. She and Seth Denbo are also working on aligning DiRT’s “categories” with the arts-humanities.net “methods” taxonomy.
• Many of the new additions to the database are courtesy of Zach Coble, who’s been tirelessly working through a backlog of tools and reviews of tools (e.g. in Profhacker posts)

Bamboo DiRT already has listings for over 650 tools designed for collecting, analyzing and/or visualizing data, managing tasks, collaboration, and many other aspects of humanities research. DiRT is powered by community contributions — if you know of a tool or a tool review that isn’t already part of the database, please consider adding it!

If you’re at DH2012 and are in need an analog tool for note-taking, look for Bamboo DiRT pens, which include the URL that can help you discover digital tools to facilitate your research.

Josh Honn, a Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation, has been one of the most active contributors to Bamboo DiRT, recently adding many new entries to the database. We reached out to Josh about why he uses Bamboo DiRT.

In my role as Digital Scholarship Library Fellow at Northwestern University’s Center for Scholarly Communication & Digital Curation, a substantive portion of my work is dedicated to researching, learning, and testing digital research tools. My ultimate goal is to both identify specific tools the library should be implementing and supporting (often times collaboratively with other departments on campus), and to connect faculty with the best available tools for pedagogical use and scholarly research projects. Up until now, that is before I became affiliated with Bamboo DiRT, I had been collocating these resources on Delicious, a social bookmarking website. Most recently, I created a Delicious “stack” titled “Digital Scholarly Research Tools,” that I continue to use as an efficient way of saving resources I discover on a daily basis from all over the web into one central location for later use.

While our Delicious account has several followers and is open and searchable, it does not, for starters, engender the sense of community that a central database like Bamboo DiRT does; one built by academics, librarians, and others interested in the digital humanities, escience, and other forms digital scholarship. In addition, Bamboo DiRT allows for a variety of access points, making the searching experience much more intuitive and fluid, something that will benefit those new to these digital tools and practices. Finally, Bamboo DiRT gives me the ability to not only add tools to the database, but to add a robust set of metadata around those tools, allowing for better kinds of discoverability, but, and maybe more importantly, this data presents some of the initial research to users, saving them time and effort as they sort through the myriad applications, platforms, software, etc. available to us online.

For more on what kinds of projects we’re using digital research tools with, I encourage you to visit the Center’s blog or to follow us on Twitter. Like everyone else in this digital age, our services and projects are always evolving with the technology we use, so keeping up is crucial, and I hope Bamboo DiRT will be a useful, productive, and innovative central hub for all of us well into the future.

— Josh Honn

Bamboo DiRT-- a pilot project that makes it easier for scholars to find tools, services and collections to facilitate digital research-- is seeking feedback from beta testers at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science on November 20th and 21st as part of a poster on integrating digital humanities directories. Rather than attempting to capture all information relevant to digital humanists, Bamboo DiRT is the tool-centric node in what its developers hope will be a growing ecosystem of specialized directories that can achieve sustainability by combining topical focus with seamless data exchange where appropriate.

The DHCS poster illustrates the connection between Bamboo DiRT and the DHCommons project and collaboration hub. The anticipated rollout of the infrastructure needed for sharing data, in early 2012, will help DHCommons users better understand the resources that projects are using, and will enrich the Bamboo DiRT resource listings with information about what projects the resource has enabled.

Bamboo DiRT and DHCommons both welcome active feedback from beta testers throughout the rest of the year before a broader, public rollout in early 2012.