One Week | One Tool Team Launches Serendip-o-matic

After five days and nights of intense collaboration, the One Week | One Tool digital humanities team has unveiled its web application: Serendip-o-matic <http://serendipomatic.org>. Unlike conventional search tools, this “serendipity engine” takes in any text, such as an article, song lyrics, or a bibliography. It then extracts key terms, delivering similar results from the vast online collections of the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and Flickr Commons. Because Serendip-o-matic asks sources to speak for themselves, users can step back and discover connections they never knew existed. The team worked to re-create that moment when a friend recommends an amazing book, or a librarian suggests a new source. It’s not search, it’s serendipity.

Serendip-o-matic works for many different users. Students looking for inspiration can use one source as a springboard to a variety of others. Scholars can pump in their bibliographies to help enliven their current research or to get ideas for a new project. Bloggers can find open access images to illustrate their posts. Librarians and museum professionals can discover a wide range of items from other institutions and build bridges that make their collections more accessible. In addition, millions of users of RRCHNM’s Zotero can easily run their personal libraries through Serendip-o-matic.

Serendip-o-matic is easy to use and freely available to the public. Software developers may expand and improve the open-source code, available on GitHub. The One Week | One Tool team has also prepared ways for additional archives, libraries, and museums to make their collections available to Serendip-o-matic.

A team of twelve dynamic scholars, librarians, and students conceived and built Serendip-o-matic during the One Week | One Tool Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Twelve strangers worked toward a common goal and stepped into unfamiliar roles. “The intense process isn’t just about rapid prototyping — it’s about building rapid trust,” reflected Mia Ridge, the lead of the design/development team. The group members learned new skills that they will take home and share with their colleagues around the world.

To learn more about Serendip-o-matic, visit, <http://serendiptomatic.org>. For more information about the process and the team, see <http://www.oneweekonetool.org/>, or follow #owot on Twitter.