Harnessing Virtual Worlds for Arts and Humanities

A series of three high-level "summit" sessions is planned in which a carefully selected group of leading scholars in the arts and humanities will work with technology experts to: 

1) Gain an understanding of virtual world technology sufficient to stimulate ideas on how it can support and generate new humanistic research topics; 

2) Use this information to identify significant issues in humanistic scholarship that can be investigated through appropriate use of virtual worlds technology; 

3) Review and select the most promising research questions for investigation;

4) Develop a set of requirements for a virtual worlds software and content development project sufficient to support the prosecution of those research questions; 

5) Develop criteria and metrics to evaluate the impact of virtual worlds for advancing humanistic research.

In addition to the learning generated by the summit participants, the cumulative result of these sessions will be a proposal for a virtual worlds project having the potential to frame and inform further work and scholarship across the humanities, especially in those areas where scholarly insights could be gained from relatively low-cost, high-quality virtual reconstructions.