Visiting scholars Alan Liu and Rama Hoetzlein will present “The History of Thought as Networked Community: The RoSE Prototype” on Tuesday as part of the University of Virginia Digital Humanities Speaker Series.

The talk will begin at 3 p.m. in Harrison Small Auditorium and is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

RoSE (Research Oriented Social Environment) centers on a social-computing model of humanities bibliographical resources that allows users to study relationships between authors, works and commentators as a social network of the human record. The project examines the idea of modeling bibliographies of past authors and works as a dynamic and evolving society linked to today’s scholars and students.

Visualizing these movements as social networks and utilizing crowdsourcing to add data about biographical, historical and intellectual relationships can make these historical networks richer and generate more active engagement with intellectual movements, according to the project’s founders.

Liu is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the director of the RoSE project. He has also led several digital initiatives, including Transliteracies: Research in the Technological, Social, and Cultural Practices of Online Reading. He is co-founder and leader of the international 4Humanities advocacy initiative.

Liu will give a second presentation in the U.Va. Scholars’ Lab on Wednesday at 3 p.m. in Alderman Library, room 421 on “4Humanities: Values, Strategies, Technologies for Humanities Advocacy in the Digital Age.” This will be an informal talk exploring such issues as assessing values and narrative frames for communicating the worth of the humanities.

Hoetzlein, a graphics R&D engineer and media artist, is the lead scientist of RoSE. He received his Ph.D. in the Media Arts and Technology Program at UCSB. He co-founded the Game Design Initiative and developed Quanta, a semantic database for integrated storage, organization and visualization of human knowledge in interdisciplinary contexts.

The U.Va. Digital Humanities Speaker Series is a collaborative effort by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, or IATH, SHANTI, or Sciences, Humanities & Arts Network of Technological Initiatives, and the U.Va. Library Scholars’ Lab.