Professor John O'Brien of the English Department has been awarded the Daniels Family National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorship, a three-year appointment. O'Brien describes his project in part thus:

"I will use the three-year term of this award to engage students in the task of editing and annotating primary literary texts for use by other students. Over time, we will build a repository on the web of fully edited and annotated literary works that will be available for use by students and teacher around the world, who will also be invited to participate by adding additional texts and supporting materials. My project will built upon this University's well-established capabilities in the digital humanities and will bring students into contact with University resources like the Special Collections Library, the Scholars' Lab, the Digital Media Lab, and SHANTI. Most important, it will demonstrate how students can work collectively to make lasting contributions to scholarship and to the digital commons. They will learn by doing, and will create something that can be shared by others. The three years of this professorship should be long enough to bring this project to the proof-of-concept stage, establishing standards of work flow and sustainability so that we can demonstrate this to teachers at other colleges and universities."