Bamboo Project awarded planning grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

March 25, 2008

The University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago were jointly awarded a $1.4M grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to a carry out an 18-month planning project to develop a cyberinfrastructure for the arts, humanities, and interpretive social sciences.

Bamboo is a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary effort to bring together researchers in arts and humanities, computer and information scientists, librarians, and campus information technologists to collectively tackle the question: How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?

The Bamboo Planning Program will carry out an 18-month planning and community design initiative. Through a series of conversations and workshops, Bamboo will map out scholarly practices and technology challenges and needs across the humanities disciplines in order to discover where a coordinated, cross-disciplinary technology development effort can best foster academic innovation. At the end of the planning period, it is the intention of the program team to submit a Bamboo implementation proposal in partnership with a range of other institutions and organizations. So far, more than 80 universities and other organizations concerned with the humanities have signed on to participate in the Bamboo planning process. The UC entities participating in Bamboo are UC California Digital Library, UC Humanities Research Institute, UC Press, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, and UC San Diego.

Bamboo is co-led by Janet Broughton, Dean of Arts and Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley, and Gregory A. Jackson, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at the University of Chicago; it is co-directed by David Greenbaum, Director of IST-Data Services at UC Berkeley, and Chad Kainz, Senior Director for Academic Technologies, Networking Services and Information Technologies at the University of Chicago. The Bamboo Program Manager is Rich Meyer.