SEASR co-PI Loretta Auvil will participate in the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo Workshop. With other higher education; museum and library; and organization, society, and agency leaders from across the U.S., she will attend the second session of The Planning Process & Understanding Arts and Humanities Scholarship workshop, which will be held from May 15-17, 2008 at the University of Chicago.

SEASR is twice mentioned in the Project Bamboo proposal, which sets as its goal formulating a strategic plan for enhancing the arts and humanities through the “development of shared technology services” (3). As one possible approach, the proposal recommends service-oriented architectures—such as SEASR’s—which emphasize ”being able to re-use and weave together loosely-coupled, discrete, specialized technology services that come from other providers and projects rather than building and managing all on one’s own.” The proposal goes on to say that “Critical to such an approach is the implementation of a web services framework. Such a framework is not a vertical application that focuses on a single in-depth function or a self-contained software tool used directly by a user, but rather a horizontally integrating set of technologies and set of core shared capabilities that enable the creation, aggregation, and reuse of services and resources among scholars, projects, and institutions” (15-16). The passage notes SEASR’s special strength in data analysis and mining tools.

In imagining a vision of the humanities researcher of the future and her work process, the Bamboo proposal turns to SEASR once again, envisioning a synthetic Bamboo composer that uses a visual programming environment similar to the one SEASR uses today in its workbench (20).