RoSE is an online exploration environment for humanities students and researchers modeled as a dynamic “social network” of authors and works, past or present.  It presents bibliographical information on the human record as an interconnected network of evolving relationships between, for example, an author’s influences, friends, and collaborators; or an author’s or intellectual movement’s works in their interconnections.  RoSE allows users to add items to the network, visualize the results, make collections of resources, and create storyboards to organize their findings into meaningful arguments or narratives. (RoSE also facilitates finding full texts or other information about the resource online, but it does not contain the full texts themselves.)

In essence, RoSE is a discovery tool.  When beginning to do research or thinking on an author, work, or movement, users can explore RoSE to see what the interesting clusters and pathways of relationship are that might suggest interpretations and theses.