Twelve digital humanists gathered from Sunday July 28 – Saturday August 3, 2013, for One Week | One Tool, a summer institute sponsored by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, to create a new digital humanities tool. The idea was to bring togethers DHers from diverse backgrounds (e.g., designers, developers, scholars, teachers, project managers, etc.), provide a day of training, and then turn them loose to create something.

The team produced Serendip-o-matic, a serendipity engine that allows users to input text and then “connects your sources to digital materials located in libraries, museums, and archives around the world,” through portals like the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, Flickr Commons, and Trove. The process of creating Serendip-o-matic was just as important as the end product, and many of the team members documented their personal experiences with the project. A more complete list of writings about Serendip-o-matic and One Week | One Tool can be found on Twitter under #owot, but a few places to start include posts by Brian Croxall, Amanda Visconti, Mia Ridge, and Jack Dougherty.