Research IT staff have completed work on a $150,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop a variety of new features and integrations for the DiRT (Digital Research Tools) directory, and transition the project to a new organizational home. DiRT emerged in its current form as part of Project Bamboo, a humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative led by UC Berkeley from 2008-2012. In October 2013, UC Berkeley received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to extend the directory in new ways, including exchanging data with the DHCommons project directory, and integrating with the Commons In A Box (CBOX) scholarly networking platform. To integrate with CBOX, Research IT staff partnered with a team at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York led by Professor Matthew K. Gold; Boone Gorges was the lead developer on the CBOX plugin. Agile Humanities Agency undertook the Drupal development for the DHCommons integration.
The formal ownership of DiRT will now transition from UC Berkeley to centerNet, an international organization of digital humanities centers whose audience and interests significantly overlap with DiRT’s. The transition gives centerNet responsibility for the directory’s hosting and its long-term planning. UC Berkeley will continue to play a role in DiRT’s development through Digital Humanities Coordinator Quinn Dombrowski’s ongoing role as the project director of DiRT. DiRT will also continue to be a valuable resource for the Digital Humanities at Berkeley initiative, which itself received a $2 million dollar Mellon grant in 2015.
For more about the new features on DiRT developed with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, please see this post on the Digital Humanities site.