Bamboo is a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organizational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities, computer scientists, information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to tackle the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

Not only is the project of intellectual interest to me (as someone deeply interested in the issues of “shared technology services”) but also of great personal interest (since I know quite a few of the personnel involved with the project, including one of the co-project directors, David Greenbaum, who used to be my boss.) One particular angle I hope to explore is answering the question of what are the implications of Project Bamboo on Zotero and vice-versa?

The immediate prompt for this post is Sorin Matei’s The Bamboo Digital Humanities Initiative: A Modest Proposal. Matei’s post has been of sufficient interest to me that I using it to prompt some discussion in a community of humanists and technologists. Matei makes a lot of useful points, but the segment that caught my attention is:

The role of the Bamboo platform would be to simplify this task by making access to tools, by enhancing our ability to connect digital objects and artifacts, our ability to connect with colleagues and students via simple, directly intuitive and universally available interfaces that all converge on the scholars’ desktop, preferably in the format of a word processor. [emphasis mine] Moreover, the platform should integrate in the most straightforward manner the learning and writing processes with those dedicated to publishing. This should be done in such a manner that dedicated genres and modus operandi (articles, book monographs, peer review, scientific validity checks, etc.) would survive, flourish even, under the new digital regime.

Amen. That’s an approach I’ve been pursuing for a while now (in the Scholar’s Box, for example)– and one I think that Zotero, as a desktop client, with some capacity for extensibility, can embody rather deeply.

Matei goes on:

I stop here, rather abruptly, waiting for reactions. I am planning, however, to release a sketch of such a platform, including essential services and affordances. It will also try to leverage the idea of the mashup editor as basic architecture strategy, which could be use to support the infrastructure of the system.

I’m naturally intrigued as someone focused on mashups and interested in developing “Zotero as a mashup platform”. Has Sorin Matei used Zotero? How would Zotero fit in with Matei’s sketch of such a platform?

Of note is an upcoming workshop aimed at libraries — CARL-IT North: Mashup the Library: An introduction to mashup technology and the art of remixing library and information resources.

codepad:

codepad.org is an online compiler/interpreter, and a simple collaboration tool. Paste your code below, and codepad will run it and give you a short URL you can use to share it in chat or email.

I’d like to experiment with it to see whether it’s a good place to paste code fragments that I want to share (and run!). I also want to think through how it sandboxes runnable code.

A data hosting approach has your personal data stored on a server chosen by you. (You might have that server right in your own house, or pay for hosting services.) If you pay, that server’s duty is not to exploit your data, but rather to protect it. That’s what you’re paying for. You can have more than one (with different personas, if you like) but for now let’s imagine having just one.Your data host’s job is to perform actions on your data. Rather than giving copies of your data out to a thousand companies (the Facebook and Data Portability approach) you host the data and perform actions on it, programmed by those companies who are developing useful social applications.

I find data hosting appealing and would like to shift towards hosting my own data as opposed to having my data hosted elsewhere. It’s a matter of making it practical though.

For instance, I’m a big fan of Flickr because it makes it so easy to have my photos taken care of. But ideally, I’d like to host my own photos and directly control how people access them. I’d do that if I could build a good repository and layer services on top of them — just like Flickr. But Flickr has an economy of scale that I don’t have — it can solve that problem and provide the solution to many people.

Now, it’s possible that we can solve that problem too and sell and/orr share it to lots of people so that they can do more of their own data hosting. Is that a business that I would want to be in?

Let me tell you a bit of what I’m thinking and where I’m coming from. Obviously, I think that the topic of mashups is a big deal given my willingness to write a whole book about it. The element that excites me most is the power that individuals and small groups of people now have to recombine data and services — to use mashups to make sense of the world — particularly in the corner of the world in which I’m immersed (teaching, learning, and research in the context of higher education, libraries, and museums). When I first learned about XML and web services, I thought — wow — this is going to change the way we do research and way we teach and learn. I spoke about this topic at the O’Reilly ETCon in 2003.

I’ve built a research prototype (called the Scholar’s Box) to enable scholars to gather data from different sources, create personal collections, and share them with others. (I’m an advisor to a project called Zotero (http://www.zotero.org/) — which provides a Firefox plugin to enable people to manage bibliographic collections within the web browser — and ultimately to share their collections.)

I teach a course at the School of Information at UC Berkeley call “Mixing and Remixing Information“. This semester will be the third term I teach the course. It’s a project-based course, in which the focus is on helping students build their own mashups (see http://blog.mixingandremixing.info/s08/class-projects/ for some mashups from [this] year’s class) . A good number of my students have next-to-no experience with web programming. I have found that showing students the power of mashups — to get people excited about the possibilities — and then teach them how to make mashups is an excellent way into web programming. I’ve taken this approach with teenagers with some success last summer — I taught a six week course on the Berkeley campus.

In addition to master’s students this semester, I’ll be teaching a six week hands-on course to campus IT staff about building next-generation campus IT services — again by studying things like Flickr and Google maps and Yahoo! Pipes, getting them to build mashups, and thinking about how we can do things like that on campus — for administration and for research.

Now that I’m finished writing my book, I’m thinking about other opportunities. Perhaps it’s just the geek in me, but I really do think that some combination of Web 2.0 mashups, a bit more rigor from SOA, imagination, and some understanding of real problems can transform the worlds of education and research (and other worlds too — but education and research are something I know about.) I’m setting out to build a small company whose goal is to help the educational community effectively use Web 2.0 ideas (with a specific emphasis on remixability) to change the way we do things in that community. I will confess that my business plan still needs to be written, however…. In the meantime, I’m experimenting with a mix of teaching, consulting, and building software. (Some collaborators and I have a grant proposal in to enhance the teaching and learning of art history by integrating Flickr into the computational fabric of the classroom.) Most of all, I believe in the power of ideas — hence, I wrote a book to teach others.

Lots of questions remain however. (Now that my teaching jobs have come to an end, I now have some serious amounts of time to plot out my next steps. Writing is a great help to me in sorting out my thoughts, especially when I’m writing for a public audience. I would like to build a business but am unclear on exactly what it should look like. Undoubtedly, there will be details that would be unwise for me to share publicly– but I believe that a lot of my thinking would benefit from putting my ideas out there.

• My book Pro Web 2.0 Mashups: Remixing Data and Web Services was published by Apress on February 25, 2008.  It’s gotten some good reviews, and I’ve heard from some happy readers. It’s time, however, for some more intense promotion of my book to make sure it fully reaches the audience it is meant to serve. (Most of my book-related activities will be discussed at my MashupGuide blog.)

• In April, I finished teaching a six-week course (“Building Next-Generation Campus Information Services” for IT staff on the Berkeley campus. “The course designed to introduce campus professionals to the concepts of Web 2.0, XML, web services, and elements of web application development through the lens of mashups. While completing a six-week long project, participants will advance their knowledge and abilities, and gain insight into potential solutions to the information management needs they face on the job.” I plan to post more details about the course, including how it was structured, what projects came out of the class, and how I think this course can be improved.

• Last week marked the culminating open house of the Mixing and Remixing Information course I teach at the School of Information at UC Berkeley. I had a blast teaching the course for the third time though I wonder whether it’s time for a total (or at least substantial ) revamp of the course.

• I’ve started to contribute regularly to ProgrammableWeb, which I described in my book as “the most useful web site for keeping up with the world of mashups, specifically, the relationships between all the APIs and mashups out there.”  That was before I started writing for it!  See the posts I’ve written for PW so far.

• Finally, I’ve recently become the Integration Advisor for the Zotero Project, working on developing developer documentation for them, thinking about how to integrate Zotero with other things (in a sense, Zotero as a client-side mashup platform) — specifically in the context of Zotero-Internet Archive alliance.  My work for Zotero will be a big part of what I’ll be discussing on this blog.

As I learn Django, a Python web programming framework, I’m starting to think about alternative frameworks, such as Ruby on Rails and Symfony (for PHP5). Is Symfony something to recommend to my students?

I then began some rough calculations and determined that if I used only four machines, it could take some time to generate all 11 million article PDFs. But thanks to the swell people at Amazon, I got access to a few more machines and churned through all 11 million articles in just under 24 hours using 100 EC2 instances, and generated another 1.5TB of data to store in S3. (In fact, it work so well that we ran it twice, since after we were done we noticed an error in the PDFs.)

Wow, we as individuals have access to more and more computing power at lower prices all the time. I’ve long wanted to make use of the EC2 and S3 infrastructure.   I don’t think that many people on campus know about EC2 and S3.   Researchers who need a lot of computational power might build their own clusters or access the central campus services — or they may start using things like EC2 and S3.  (That’s my argument). So far I’ve not had any need for S3 and EC2  — but I’m pretty sure that this year will bring some projects my way that will give me an excuse to use EC2 and S3!

(BTW, I’m thrilled to learn about open.blogs.nytimes.com, which lets geeks who are also fans of the Times  get a glimpse into the IT technology behind an important online paper.)