I’m very proud to announce that Boone Gorges, Lead Developer of the CUNY Academic Commons, recently took part in a remarkable summer institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities. Titled “One Week | One Tool: A Digital Barn Raising,” the program gathered twelve participants from across the country in Fairfax, Virginia to spend an intensive week at the Center for History and New Media designing, building, documenting, and publicizing a new Digital Humanities tool.

Here is a short description of the program from the website:

One Week | One Tool is inspired by both longstanding and cutting-edge models of rapid community development. For centuries rural communities throughout the United States have come together for “barn raisings” when one of their number required the diverse set of skills and enormous effort required to build a barn—skills and effort no one member of the community alone could possess. In recent years, Internet entrepreneurs have likewise joined forces for crash “startup” or “blitz weekends” that bring diverse groups of developers, designers, marketers, and financiers together to launch a new technology company in the span of just two days. One Week | One Tool will build on these old and new traditions of community development and the natural collaborative strengths of the digital humanities community to produce something useful for humanities work and to help balance learning and doing in digital humanities training.

The exact nature of the tool the team built has been a closely guarded secret, but it will be revealed at 2:30pm ET today on Ustream. Meanwhile, you can find ongoing conversation about the tool and about #oneweek itself by checking out the archive of #oneweek tweets, which includes links to a number of excellent posts written by the participants, including Boone.

I’ll add an update to this post after the tool is revealed, and I hope you’ll tune in to Ustream to find out what the #oneweek team has built! And congratulations to Boone and to the entire #oneweek team for their hard work on this project.

UPDATE: And the tool is . . . . Anthologize, a WordPress plugin that allows bloggers to transfrom online content into an eBook format!

More from the site:

Anthologize is a free, open-source, plugin that transforms WordPress 3.0 into a platform for publishing electronic texts. Grab posts from your WordPress blog, import feeds from external sites, or create new content directly within Anthologize. Then outline, order, and edit your work, crafting it into a single volume for export in several formats, including—in this release—PDF, ePUB, TEI.

The site details several different ways that the tool can be used in the classroom, libraries and museums. Check out the Use Cases for more.

Anthologize requires the latest version of WordPress, which we will be installing on the Commons in a few weeks. Once we have it installed, we will add Anthologize to the group of plugins available to all members. We hope you’ll use it!

Congratulations to the entire One Week team for their inspiring work. And, in line with Tom’s note that the basis of the NEH program is training, I’m planning to meet with Boone next week to discuss lessons from the One Week program that can be incorporated into the workflow and project management of the CUNY Academic Commons.

UPDATE 2: Meagan Timney has compiled a comprehensive set of Anthologize-related links on her blog