Any DH projects to which I commit a significant amount of time must pass review by the college’s DH Program advisory committee. A faculty member can’t walk into my office and demand that I spend several hours programming for them.

Part of my job description is to produce open source and provide an infrastructure that can support a large number of DH projects. We’re trying to avoid ad hoc development that only supports one project, so no one project can dictate what I need to provide. This also means that almost all DH projects that were off the ground before I started in November are not expecting programming support from me.

If I see that I’m unable to do my job because of faculty demands, I have several ways of pushing back while giving faculty a way to have their request vetted by a peer-review process. I also have office hours during which anyone can drop by and talk about anything. It’s a bit of an experiment for us, but it seems to be going well so far.

A lot of my support for individual projects has been as a consultant helping faculty understand the technology so they can write their grant applications, conference proposals, etc. We’re still in the bootstrapping stage for the position and the Program. We hope to have a few project proposals come through over the summer and early fall. These would be the first to have full support from my position.

My use of a bibliography was purely for illustration, though it is relevant to what we’re doing. I am also interested in genealogy because that field has done a lot of work with relationships between people. Another example of a question I want to be able to ask someday is (assuming a database of O’Reilly authors), “who are the grandchildren of the author of _Programming Collective Intelligence_?” and perhaps, “where do they live now?” displayed on a Google Maps mash-up (perhaps to see if they prefer the coasts).

Simile Exhibit does look nice. I think I’ve seen it before, but it’s been a while. Definitely something I’ll be making available to faculty — it might provide the basis for a faceted browsing widget.

It sounds like you’d also need a vocabulary/ies to link up the statements of fact to the references…I’m very curious about what kinds of facts you anticipate needing to work with, and what vocabularies you are or are thinking about bringing in.

Last, if you haven’t already seen it I’d suggest checking out DBpedia. They’ve scraped Wikipedia info and put it into RDF. That might be something either to think about incorporating, or at least checking out!
BTW–generally speaking, Semantic Web/RDF stuff is exactly the kind of stuff I’d like to talk about at THATCamp, too!