The Human Sciences Cyberinfrastructure Toolkit is a collection put together by HASTAC members of existing open-source software, search engines, and applications for broad public use by researchers and students in the humanities and interpretive social sciences. If you have a CI tool you would like to contribute to this collection, please contact the HASTAC project manager.

NAME: CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder

DESCRIPTION: The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder is a system designed to allow researchers in the humanities to interact with 3-dimensional artifacts and related digital content inside of a collaborative virtual environment.

The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder creates digital galleries, which are simple virtual structures emulating real-life exhibitions and collections. Visitors find themselves in a virtual space composed of various rooms, with 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional artifacts and multimedia presented in the space. Each visitor is represented by an avatar which they can navigate through the 3D space.

Built on top of HP Labs' Croquet software, the CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder allows for group collaboration and interaction within the virtual space. That is, several people may have avatars present in the space at one time which can interact with each other, and with the gallery itself. Examples of interaction include discussion, annotation of artifacts, adding hyperlinks to artifacts, as well as introducing new items into the gallery and modifying the layout of the gallery and contents.

The system can be used in a traditional authoring mode, where one or more researchers curate the gallery, creating a space for exploration by later visitors. It can also be used as a purely collaborative 3D wiki, where everyone who visits is free to modify the space. In the second approach, curating itself becomes the learning experience.

The CITRIS Collaborative Gallery Builder has been developed in cooperation with HASTAC (Humanities, Art, Science and Technology: Advanced Collaboration), the UC Humanities Research Institute, the Stanford Humanities Lab, and the Stanford Library's Buckminster Fuller Archive. We have been using digital content from the Fuller Archive in addition to artifacts digitized at the UCB Tele-Immersion Lab. The Tele-Immersion Lab is currently using their 3D scanner to digitize collections of artifacts of historical and scientific value. We are also coordinating with the lab to integrate their fully immersive 3D-video-capture system

SOURCE CODE:

http://citris.citris-uc.org/hosted/projects/ith/gallery/software.html

NAME : CivicSpace

DESCRIPTION: CivicSpace is a community organizing platform supported by an ecology of users, developers, and vendors. It allows you to build communities online and offline that can communicate effectively, act collectively, and coordinate coherently with a network of other related organizations. CivicSpace enables bottom-up people-powered campaigns to operate on a more level playing field with more traditional top-down organizations, and, similarly, allows top-down organizations to leverage the power of grassroots organizing. CivicSpace is built on Drupal , a flexible and powerful "best of breed" CMS capable of running all kinds of websites. It comes with a WYSIWIG editor and it is extremely simple to learn how to update and submit content on your site. A selection of sample themes are included with CivicSpace and the theming system gives you complete control over the appearance and layout of your website. For a list of features see below:

• Blogging All the features you would expect in a top tier blogging tool (WYSIWYG editor, trackback, image and file upload, syndication) plus peer moderation and peer publishing tools. You can give every user on your CivicSpace site the ability to post and manage an individual blog.
• Forums Create as many discussion forums as you want. You can even enable your forum to accept and send email messages just like a yahoo group.
• File storage Attach files to any post as easily as attaching files to emails.
• Photo Galleries Create and maintain as many photo galleries as you want. You can even give users access to mantain their own personal galleries and comment on any picture.
• Polls and Surveys You can easily create polls and surveys to collect information from your users and reach consensus.
• Social Networking Users can search for other users with similiar profiles, add them as buddy list, and track their participation on the site.
• Contact Management with CiviCRM Currently you can dynamically create a user registration form to collect all manner of constituent information. You can import contact data from CSV files, search your database of contacts, and set permissions to access them. A much more powerful and easier to use Community Relationship Management system (CiviCRM) is currently in development and has replaced current Contact Management in December 2005. It will have a much more powerful data model that will make it possible to use CivicSpace as your main donor and volunteer database and will feature simple but powerful searching, permission, data importing / exporting, and reporting tools. More information on the project is can be found "here".
• Mass Mailing Our current solution allows you to create multiple mailinglists, manage subscribers, and send thousands of emails at a time. Our improved version is based on functionality in PHPList will support bounce tracking, open rates, tokens, and HTML templates.
• CiviContribute - an advanced donation system under development by the CiviCRM team.
• Events - The event system allows users to submit and mantain event listings on your site. You can send and track invitations to events and find and manage volunteers.

The HASTAC website is powered by CivicSpace.

Source Code: http://civicspacelabs.org/home/civicspace

NAME : Citation Mapping Tool

DESCRIPTION: A Citation Mapping Tool is a visualization tool that helps to uncover relationships among entries in a database. The tool can be applied to any database (e.g. patents, websites, articles) and graphically networks entries based on shared citations that the user specifies. Entries that share these citations are geographically clustered together in a three-dimensional visualization. This method of gathering related entries has advantages over keyword analysis since loosely related documents can often share the same contextual vocabulary and contain very few discriminating terms. While not a complete solution to issues in the classification of technical literature, citation mapping tools provide a valuable alternative method to parse information of a dataset.

The Jenkins Collaboratory at Duke University is studying the role of patents and government policies in encouraging or hindering innovation. The citation mapping tool has played a significant role in helping to solve the challenges that arise when analyzing databases of patents and scientific articles. Rarely does the bibliographic data in patents and scientific articles directly address the questions posed by investigators of technological change. More often, these standard methods of classifying patents and articles are misleading. For example, while many articles can be categorized according to their journal, some of the most important articles appear in interdisciplinary publications. Similarly, the two types of classifications listed for U.S. patents are usually unhelpful because they are primarily oriented toward prior art searches rather than conceptually grouping related technologies. If one were to analyze these datasets using keyword analysis, one would find many of the most specific terms too new or applied inconsistently across individuals, institutions, geographies, and technical domains. In the case of patents and articles, the citation mapping tool places documents that cite each other nearby. The resulting visual landscape helps to reveal what scientists considered relevant to their publications (the examiner also can add references to patents). These landscapes allow for exploration of large numbers of entities and aid in uncovering relationships and trends that would otherwise be difficult to identify. Gathering information from a broad database of patents, the tool visually highlights relationships among industry, universities, and government. These connections provide starting points for further investigation into what motivates these players to patent or license their discoveries.

SOURCE CODE: Examples of these tools include the Information Visualization Core from Indiana University ( http://iv.slis.indiana.edu ) and VxInsight from Sandia Labs ( http://www.cs.sandia.gov/projects/VxInsight.html )

NAME: Video Annotation System

DESCRIPTION: One of the research projects developed within the Jenkins Collaboratory at Duke University , the Video Annotation System is a web-based video annotation tool that allows users to add text commentary of any length to streaming video content. Users attach their comment to a time-stamped location in the video. Other viewers can add further commentary to that point in a discussion thread; or, they can add a new discussion theme at the same location in the video.

The tool has a wide range of uses for teaching and research. Recent application has been in connection with benchside consultations with scientists and engineers working in biomedicine and nanotechnology about potential societal and ethical implications of the work going on in their laboratories. Additionally, the Duke University course ISIS 250: Critical Studies and New Media has applied the Video Annotation System in a teaching context. As the class studied the film BladeRunner , students continued discussion out-of-class by posting comments to specific parts of the film on a class website.

SOURCE CODE: http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/jenkins/research/index.html

NAME: Video Traces

DESCRIPTION: One tool that has been successfully adapted by arts and humanities practitioners is called Video Traces a tool where users may capture a piece of rich digital media (a video segment, an image, a piece of music) and annotate that media both visually (using a pointer to record gestures) and verbally. The resulting product is a video trace: a piece of media plus its annotationin essence, a recorded show & tell. Traces can be viewed by their creator, exchanged with others, and further annotated for a variety of teaching and learning purposes, especially those that support collaborative and distributed learning in new ways. Video Traces provides a unique opportunity to capture embodied knowledge and educational interactions by supporting the most common ways people communicate their ideasthrough talking, showing, and pointing.

SOURCE CODE: Must obtain Educational license to use:

For Video Traces, further information may be found at

http://depts.washington.edu/pettt/projects/videotraces.html and http://faculty.washington.edu/reedstev/vt.html

Contact information:

Reed Stevens, Associate Professor

College of Education

University of Washington

reedstev@u.washington.edu

NAME: HASS Grid Portal Tool

DESCRIPTION: The HASS Grid will provide a home for digitized artifacts including 3-D, audio, video and text collections crucial to research in humanities, arts and social science (HASS) communities. The HASS Grid provides a base platform for integrating the full range of multimedia cyber-tools in support of accessing and analyzing large databases across the humanities, arts and social sciences. It will prove crucial for future work in cultural representation, the understanding of material culture, their historical conditions and social implications. It will also offer opportunities to a broader range of intellectual communities to revisit older interests such as the analysis of ancient manuscripts.

In July, UCHRI began the construction and deployment of cyberbricks. These bricks, or storage computers, enable access to aggregated, integrated, data-storage systems. Through this system, UCHRI will provide a low-cost, scalable, long-term archive for HASS data collections. UCHRI intends to bring 25TB of storage space online by June.

Initially, the HASS Grid will be a test-bed for HASS researchers throughout the University of California . Starting in spring, the system will be released to a wider audience.

UCHRI is working with the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC-Berkeley and the San Diego Supercomputer Center to create the systems for storing, accessing, analyzing and manipulating the data collections crucial to HASS research. Together, UCHRI, CITRIS and SDSC are building an interface between the CITRIS Digital Gallery Builder -- a 3-D virtual world space for presenting and collaborating on digital collections -- and SDSC's Storage Resource Broker -- a client-server middleware designed to manage file collections in heterogeneous, distributed environments.

SOURCE CODE: http://www.uchri.org

NAME: WebArchivist.org

DESCRIPTION: WebArchivist.org is a research and software development group based at the University of Washington and the SUNY Institute of Technology that works with scholars, librarians, and archivists interested in preserving and analyzing materials created for and distributed on the Web. WebArchivist.org provides a platform for identifying, collecting, cataloguing and analyzing large-scale archives of Web objects. The platform is based on a suite of server-based software tools and techniques for collaborative Web-based research, including the collection, analysis, and presentation of materials, and the provision of public access to metadata and archived materials. It also provides support for instructional activities associated with archived Web materials, including student-produced Web sites requiring repeated evaluation. In producing an archive, digital materials for a Web sphere (a collection of Web sites related to a specific event or subject, created over a specific time period) are identified, archived and catalogued along with associated metadata. A Web sphere collection may be analyzed for publications and presentations in professional and scholarly settings using standard analysis tools measuring the breadth and scope of the sphere, as well as the emergence of features and structures enabling social, political, and communicative action within the sphere. The tools and software are available freely to educators through a licensing agreement.

SOURCE CODE: Must obtain Educational license to use:

For WebArchives.org, further information may be found at http://webarchivist.org/

For licensing information, please contact:

UW Techtransfer Digital Ventures

(206) 616-3451

ventures@u.washington.edu

http://depts.washington.edu/ventures/

NAME: The Sakai Project

DESCRIPTION: The Sakai Project is a community source software development effort to design, build and deploy a new Collaboration and Learning Environment (CLE) for higher education. Sakai provides an application framework and associated CMS tools and components that are designed to work together. These components are for course management, and, as an augmentation of the original CMS model, they also support research collaboration. Using a web browser, users choose from Sakai 's many tools to create a worksite that is suited for courses, projects, and/or research collaboration. For coursework, Sakai provides features to supplement and enhance teaching and learning. For projects and collaboration, Sakai has tools to help organize communication and collaborative work on campus and around the world. To use Sakai , no knowledge of HTML is necessary. Here are some examples of worksites made with Sakai : a worksite where an instructor or project director can make announcements and share resources, such as electronic documents or links to other websites, a worksite that serves as an online discussion board, and a course worksite where students can work on and submit assignments electronically.

Using Sakai , the University of Michigan has built is own online system for research, project, and course management called CTools. With CTools, the Law in Slavery and Freedom Project, a distributed curricular and research initiative spanning three continents, conducts online seminars taught by faculty from the University of Michigan, The Ecoles des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France, the University of Cologne, Germany, the University of Campinas, Brazil, and the Centro Juan Marinello in Cuba. Students from these institutions participate in online discussions of readings on the topic of law and slavery in the Atlantic world. The Law and Slavery Project is an environment in which north and south, Europe and America , generate knowledge jointly and share it with both faculty and students. Asymmetrical lines of knowledge production and dissemination are thus circumvented thanks to the project's use of new technology, and the global south is recognized as an active and equal player.

SOURCE CODE: For more information, please visit: http://sakaiproject.org