Supporting novel notions
Imagine Shakespeare with a Facebook page. It might feature quotations from his works and relate them to current events, as if he were interacting with us now. His "friends" might be writers — dead or alive — and others inspired by his works.
Bringing the most notable authors from the past into a social network with living scholars is not far-fetched. UC Santa Barbara English professor Alan Liu is developing the Research-oriented Social Environment (RoSE), a digital network that marries the bibliography of past humanities knowledge — books, authors and documents — and social computing. Users can create the relationships across the bibliography with social networking tools.
The project was first developed in Liu's Transliteracies Project, funded by a UC Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI) grant. The project teamed UC scholars in the humanities, social sciences and engineering to examine the world of online reading and to design a technology to improve the community experience in research and reading. It also seeding a National Endowment for the Humanities grant to continue developing RoSE.
UC funding encourages novel and innovative approaches in the humanities. It drives scholars to explore cutting-edge issues and the intersection of humanities with society, technology and the world of tomorrow.
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