Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities

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Building a Virtual Research Environment for the
Humanities

• Ruth Kirkham Project Manager
• John Pybus Technical Support
• http//bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk

Oxford Internet Institute 7 February 2006
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• The humanities division at Oxford University
  wanted to create a virtual environment to assist
  researchers with their work
• The BVREH is a 15 month project to investigate
  the suitability of a VRE within the Humanities at
  Oxford
• The project breaks down into three main stages

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• Stage One
• Detailed ICT user requirements survey,
  initially of Oxford
• humanities researchers
• Stage Two
• Three to four demonstrator tools
• Stage Three
• Recommendations as to what might be included in
  a fully fledged humanities VRE

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• Supporting the Mechanism of Research
• Many of the same, generic needs have been
  expressed time after time

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Discovery

• Searchable lists of conferences and seminars
• Information regarding grants and funding
• Working with Research Services
• Research Discovery Service (RDS)
• Database of research interests
• Enables collaboration

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Making information available to others

• Assistance in Publishing online
• Personal Content Management System
• Institutional Repository

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Communications

• Video Conferencing/Access Grid
• Chat facilities (IRC)
• Voice over IP (VoIP)

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Access Grid Node at the Centre for e-Research at
the University of Bristol
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Tools to support the Humanities Researcher

• Current stage
• About to build prototype/mock-up tools
• Exactly what still being finalized

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Research

• Find Material
• Search on terms
• View Identify items of interest
• Organise make notes
• Compare process
• Use specialised tools
• Maybe consult with collaborator
• Repeat the above
• Compose output to great acclaim

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Locating Material

• Search on-line databases
• Cross Search multiple sources
• Provide a Front End to ease this rather than
  replacement for existing sources
• Retrieve and Integrate data from multiple sources
• DataGrids

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a Personal Space

• Store
• View
• Organise
• Annotate...

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Virtual Lightbox

• Embeds in Browser
• Java
• Multiple Images
• Multiple sites
• Maryland Institute for Technology in the
  Humanities

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Virtual Lightbox
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VLMA

• Extension to Virtual Lightbox
• Reading University Max Planck Institute for the
  History of Science
• Sponsored by the JISC

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VLMA

• Uses RDF
• Not concurrent views, but can save and distribute
  a view
• Requires Java plug-ins
• (rather immature)

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RDF

• Resource Description Framework
• W3C standard to represent metadata

Subject
Object
Predicate
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a Common Space

• Researcher has personal Collection Notes
• Shares part with collaborator
• Both view/edit remotely
• Combine with communication tools
• VoIP
• Chat (IRC)
• Communicate back to data source maintainer
• Assisted by SemWeb infrastructure

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Acknowledgements

• Principle Investigators
• Prof. Alan Bowman Faculty of Classics
• Dr Charles Crowther Faculty of Classics
• Michael Fraser OU Computing Services
• Matthew Dovey OU Computing Services
• Thanks to
• Marina Jirotka OU Computing Labs
• Leif Isaksen VLMA Project

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Thank you and goodbye

• ?