The School of Athens (1509-1511), fresco by Raphael in the Vatican (Wikimedia Commons). I’m looking forward to visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in April for a monumental Raphael exhibition. I chose one of his pictures to decorate my post because it implies that knowledge creation, curation, and dissemination hinge on conversation. The thought leaders here are reading and writing, but more importantly (to me) they are discussing and arguing, sifting, sorting, and pondering, taking nothing for granted, questioning everything. Resurgam likes that old way of getting an education. We are exploring new and maybe more democratic ways to do it.
Broadly speaking, Resurgam currently supports two categories of labor in the digital humanities:
- Content Curation
- Infrastructure
Both categories are represented in our Programs and explicitly developed in the fundable Projects described on our website.
In March 2026, we advanced a project in each of the categories. If our grant applications are successful in the coming months, two synchronous but different facets of our mission will flourish simultaneously.
Fingers crossed. I’m excited!
Content Curation
In the category of Content Curation, we advanced a project called Unbury Treasure in the Stacks by asking a distinguished foundation to fund travel expenses.
The travel is scheduled to occur in October 2026. It will transport an investigator, equipped with a portable book scanner, from Chicago to London for two full weeks of grinding research in the British Library.
Friends of Resurgam and George Moore Interactive may be familiar with this project. Our specific aim is to find and scan nearly ninety uncollected articles by George Moore in vintage, barely readable, undigitized periodicals that were printed from the 1880s until the 1930s.
With that work performed in one well-planned visit to England, the found articles will be transcribed, edited, annotated as necessary, and published in the Aesthetics pillar of GMi by March 2027.
Hundreds of George’s articles are already published there, neatly arranged in chronological order. When these last 90 are added, all of his known literary criticism and art criticism will be freely available in one navigable digital archive: readable, searchable, analyzable, and open to public comments.
There may be more uncollected articles still awaiting discovery, and that is why we say known criticism. We hope that more articles lost to time will be discovered! We’re ready for that.
A wonderful thing about publishing digitally is that unanticipated additions and corrections can instantly join a corpus, maintaining its definitive status even as more content comes to light over time.
That’s not possible in print publication.
Another wonderful thing about publishing digitally is that content can be searched and subjected to interpretive AI-assisted analysis. And that was the focus of our second advance in March.
Infrastructure
With help from ChatGPT and Codeable, I recently wrote a statement of work for the new GMi Discovery System. At first I called it Universal Search, but changed the name to connote more capabilities as a scholarly research tool.
Let me explain.
The GMi Discovery System is going to enable advanced search of text throughout the WordPress website of George Moore Interactive.
How much text is that? Currently there are about 2,400 pages, each one containing thousands of words. We are preparing the website for rapid growth to 10,000+ pages with around 30,000,000 words.
George Moore’s literary legacy is large and complex. It requires advanced technology for readability, coherence, and usability on the front end, plus efficiency and maintainability on the back end.
The GMi Discovery System will deliver all of that with:
- Keyword search of HTML markup and embedded Google Docs
- Nightly indexing of the site to keep pace with changes
- Search results ranked by relevance and contextualized with snippets
- Faceted search to filter for user-defined meaning
- Chronological search to filter by user-defined time period
- Modal search to filter by category of printed and holographic writing
The GMi Discovery System will also generate user-defined timelines of the author’s life, work and legacy. This is the Chronology pillar of GMi that was visionary until now because I had no idea how to build one.
Now we have more than an idea; we have a plan, a team, and a budget.
I mentioned that discovery connotes search but also more than search. I was referring to simulation.
A very practical and tangible way to kickstart literary legacies is to reanimate the authors: bringing them back to (virtual) life to speak for themselves and converse with living interlocutors.
The GMi Discovery System is a big step towards doing just that. It will enable machine-learning and ingestion of curated content into a custom large language model.
Why does that matter?
It’s the technical foundation for an AI chatbot that knows what George knew, thinks the way he thought, speaks with his voice, sees things from his point of view: in fact, a high-fidelity simulation of a historic author that is capable of authentic, spontaneous conversations with readers!
The GMi Discovery System will make building that capability feasible.
Grants
A grant application for Unbury Treasure in the Stacks was submitted in March. A decision will be made in August. Hopefully our application will be competitive and the travel will occur in October.
If not, we’ll try again elsewhere.
While we wait, we have started qualifying other foundations for their fit with the GMi Discovery System, involving infrastructure rather than curation.
In addition to unlocking value for readers and scholars, the GMi Discovery System may appeal strongly to funders who want to multiply the impact of their investment.
That’s because Resurgam has promised to share its proprietary code freely and unconditionally with other curators in the digital humanities. In keeping with our bylaws: what we do for one, we do for all.
We are seeking institutional funding for both of the projects. If you as an individual wish to contribute, you easily can. Open each project on the Resurgam website and make your donation, in any amount, right there on the page.
I’ll post an update on these projects and possibly others in April. Please subscribe to be notified when I do.
Bob Becker (31 March 2026)