RoSE Research-oriented Social Environment: Bibliographical Knowledge as Social Knowledge

FAIN: HD-51433-11

University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)
Alan Y. Liu (Project Director: March 2011 to August 2013)
Rita Raley (Co Project Director: March 2011 to August 2013)

The further development of a digital environment that explores the use of social networking approaches to connect humanities bibliographical resources with humanities scholars and students.

RoSE is a Web-based system that shapes humanities bibliographical resources into a social-computing model presenting the past and present as one living "social network." In the largest terms, it is an experiment in how the humanities can engage with today's expansive knowledge society from both inside and outside the "library," in the process connecting current social-networking practices to a full sense of the historical human record. Stocked with initial information gathered from knowledge bases, RoSE provides profile pages for persons and documents, other data, and visualizations showing the interrelated nature of knowledge. Uniquely, it allows users to add metadata on top of standard bibliographical data to facilitate a social-network-like sense of active relation to the objects of research. RoSE is in early prototype. We seek to improve several key areas so that we can make RoSE available as an "open beta" for humanities scholars and other digital humanities projects to explore.