One such "virtual commons" discussed last year at Kalamazoo and the year
before at Pisa was the one that a large international
medieval historical education group, the Society for Creative Anachronism,
was establishing for group discussion of medieval
anthroponymy, toponymy, and heraldry, focussing on individual names and
naming practices, especially in areas of cross-cultural
contact, and on specific coats of arms. It is expected to be up and running
by this fall; it's still in beta at present.
Scott Catledge
At Kalamazoo last year, I heard a discussion of a project that was planning
to use an virtual commons--i.e. a place where users could contribute to the
development of the project through shared annotation, textual development,
and the like (I think they actually described it as a piazza. As I
understood the idea, and in discussion at the Digital Medievalist business
meeting a couple of people mentioned similar proposal, the idea was to build
what we might now think of as adding wiki-like capabilities to a larger,
unified, scholarly project.
Does anybody know of any scholarly projects that have actually implemented
such virtual piazza-type interaction? I'm interested in projects that allows
arbitrary users to contribute to the content, either with or without
refereeing.
-d