What we built at OWOT: Serendip-o-matic.

Well, it's been an intense week here at One Week | One Tool, but we've built something, and it works! We're proud to announce the launch of Serendip-o-matic, the serendipity engine where your sources are your search.

The idea is simple: we wanted to restore some of that serendipity-in-the-stacks feeling to the digital research process. As historians, we're used to keyword or subject searching for materials, but with Serendip-o-matic, you can use your own materials — whether a web page, a bibliography, your CV, a paper you've written, or an article you like — as your query. Serendip-o-matic processes your text, extracts a random set of key terms, and returns results from the collections at the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, and Flickr Commons. Try it for yourself and see what you get. It's pretty fun.

You can watch the video of our live launch broadcast at One Week | One Tool.

A dispatch from One Week | One Tool.

Hello HoSTM folks! I'm reporting from the field here at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, where I'm attending One Week | One Tool, a digital humanities barn raising in which I and eleven other academics, programmers, designers, students, and librarians are working to conceive, design, and implement a digital humanities tool in just under seven days. The first step: figuring out what that tool is going to be.

We had our big brainstorming session this afternoon, and are now opening up the floor to you, the public, to send us your feedback. We've set up a site where you can vote on the potential tools we've come up with, as well as to comment on our ideas. Voting closes at 10 a.m. eastern time tomorrow, Tuesday 30 July 2013, so make your voice heard!

You can follow our progress on twitter by paying attention to #owot.