I’ve just returned from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Research in Information Technology retreat at which project leaders are sharing information about open source projects in higher education and in arts groups and museums (https://rit.mellon.org/2009-rit-sc-program-retreat). Open source tools (i.e., no purchase or license fees) may be of increasing interest in the current economic environment. I wonder whether these specific tools might be of interest to faculty and students at Duke. Several products might be good extensions to the Duke Digital Initiative because of their emphasis on producing, managing and analyzing multimedia resources. Other projects or tools could be extensions of the library’s work, as the library becomes not only a source of content, but a source of consultation on working with that content in new ways to further research.
Sophie – https://www.sophieproject.org/
Sophie is a multimedia authoring tool: “software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.” People who have used it, including high school students, describe Sophie as very easy to use. Sophie is currently being rewritten in Java, and with emphasis on collaboration tools. The project’s website provides illustrations of how Sophie is being used. For example, Sol Gaitan of the Dalton School in New York developed a multimedia book for her AP Spanish students so that they could explore the direct influence of particular flamenco music styles on Lorca’s poetry. Gaitan presents both the songs and the poems they inspired, and annotates the poems from pages 11 to 43; with the students expected to follow her lead by annotating the poems in the remainder of the book. Take a look: https://www.sophieproject.org/demobooks
VUE – https://vue.tufts.edu/
VUE provides a flexible visual environment for structuring, presenting, and sharing digital information. VUE lets you look for relationships across images, define relationships, compare images, etc. As such, it is a research tool as well as a presentation tool. The VUE website has a short video (https://vue.tufts.edu/screencast/QT_hiRes.cfm) that gives an overview of its functions and how it can be used.
Zotero – https://www.zotero.org/
Zotera is free, easy-to-use Firefox extensions to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. Some of us are familiar with Zotero as a citation management tool. The developers as well as other project leaders at the RIT meeting see Zotero as having additional functionality through its connections with other tools. For example, the planned redesign of the Sakai course management system may have ways for instructors to upload lists of their publications, and then, via Zotero, find other scholars with whom they might want to connect.
eComma – https://ecomma.cwrl.utexas.edu/e392k/
The eCommentary Machine web application (“eComma”) will enable groups of students, scholars, or general readers to build collaborative commentaries on a text and to search, display, and share those commentaries online.
Sakai 3- https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/confluence/display/DOC/Sakai+3.0
A completely re-architected version of Sakai is planned for summer of 2010. This version will move away from the cookie-cutter view of course sites and instead connect with 3rd party tools (such as WordPress) and utilize gadgets and widgets that allow a site to look more like a Google personal homepage. The idea is to reflect the look and feel of tools that are already popular. You can see a demo of creating a Sakai 3 site here: https://www.sakaiproject.org/portal/site/sakai-home/page/89473b2c-31dd-4261-9823-c31a79e55532
Participants at the RIT meeting also talked about people “curating their own arts experiences,” a reflection of growing expectation for web 2.0 type functionality. As an example, someone mentioned Sonic Living, (https://sonicliving.com/) which is not an open source product, but is a relevant example. It scans your hard drive, looks at your iTunes and then suggests live music in your area that matches the interests it found. It also lets you know what concerts your friends are attending. The arts and museum community is looking for ways to get information about their organizations, performances, etc. into the workflows people already have rather than expecting them to come to a website to find information about upcoming events.