On 16-17 October, the NiCHE Digital Infrastructure will be hosting a SSHRC-funded workshop on Application Programming Interfaces for the Digital Humanities. Historians and other humanists now have access to digital primary and secondary sources on an unprecedented scale, but almost all of these resources are delivered through web browsers with the assumption that a person will be plodding through them one at at time. What we need now are ways to make these sources readily available to computer programs: intelligent agents, machine learners, adaptive filters, data mining packages, you name it. We need to be able to recombine information from multiple sources in a way that supports the discovery of new information. And we need to provide tools that allow networked collectives to work together and leverage the power and diversity of the individuals that comprise the group. We've invited researchers and programmers from some of the key projects in Canada, the US and the UK to join us to discuss these issues. To learn more, keep an eye on our API Workshop page, which will be updated over the coming weeks.

If you're excited by the potential of APIs for the digital humanities and would like to participate in some way, send me email at william.j.turkel@gmail.com