A recent post on the Federation of American Scientists web site announces a new grant they, in partnership with SRI and the University of Virginia, received from the Andrew Mellon Foundation:

FAS and SRI, with support from the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, will convene a series of 3 invitational summit meetings in 2008 that will bring together distinguished humanities scholars with experts in online communities research and virtual world technologies to identify how virtual world technology can be used to address significant issues in humanistic scholarship and advance scholarship. The findings from these summits will frame and inform further work to design, build, and populate a prototype virtual world, and evaluate its impact on advancing humanistic scholarship, scholarly communication, and learning.

I’m guessing here, but I think it’s a safe bet that the grant was based on their 2006 Summit on Educational Games.

Who better to help with questions around the populating of virtual world than the authors, students and alumni associated with the Clarion Workshop? Especially given UC San Diego’s very strong focus on virtual worlds and the technologies that underlie them, in labs like that of Adriene Jenik, Sheldon Brown, and the Calit2 Experimental Game Lab. Anyone interested in taking the lead?