On Alan Liu’s website, he provides an overview of RoSE, a research-oriented social environment:
Created as an outcome of the Transliteracies Project, RoSE is a Web-based knowledge-exploration system that fuses a social-computing model to humanities bibliographical resources to allow users to explore the present and past of the human record as one “social network.” Stocked with initial information data-mined from YAGO and Project Gutenberg (with plans for data-mining the SNAC Project), RoSE provides profile pages about persons and documents, keywords and other data, and visualizations that help users see the relationships between people and documents. Uniquely, it also allows users (humanities students, scholars, and research groups) to add “thickly described” metadata on top of standard bibliographical data. This facilitates a social-network-like sense of active, dynamic interrelation with the objects of research. (cite)
This is a very exciting project because it promises to fuse archival and current researcher networks for tracking and studying relations between authors and documents. A such, it will allow users to explore and study the lives and social networks shared by and through both documents and authors. RoSE currently requires a login, so I’ll be anxiously awaiting its opening for general access and play.