Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities (BVREH)

Oxford e-Research Centre, Alan Bowman - JISC

Principal Investigator / Director: Alan Bowman

Oxford participants: Alan Bowman; Charles Crowther; Andrew Fairweather-Tall; Michael A. Fraser; Ruth Kirkham; John Pybus; David Robey; Anne Trefethen

Other Participants: not specified

Project Webpage: http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/

Start Date: not specified

End Date: 2007

Funder: JISC

Partner organizations (inside or outside Oxford): not specified

 

 

Project Description:

The BVREH is a project supported by the Humanities Division at Oxford, hosted by the Oxford e-Research Centre, and funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), which promotes the innovative use of information and communications technology in academic teaching and research in the UK. An initial survey carried out by the BVREH team between June 2005 and September 2006 defined the range of services that a Virtual Environment should offer - from information about researchers and their interests and about conferences, lectures and seminars, to integrated communication and collaboration tools to support advanced research. The project team is now addressing the needs highlighted by the survey through a number of pilot applications designed for specific user communities with the long term aim of broadening their functionality to a wider humanities user base. In the second phase (VRE2), A Virtual Research Environment for the Study of Documents and Manuscripts (VRE-SDM), the project constructed a pilot system for on-line collaborative research on the decipherment and editing of damaged documents.