Bibliopedia will perform advanced data-mining and cross-referencing of scholarly literature to create a humanities-centered collaboratory. As a prototype, it will search resources including JSTOR and Library of Congress for metadata about scholarly articles and books that mention the famed medieval travel narrative The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, examine the articles and books for citations, then save the results in a publicly accessible database. Although using works centered around a single text as a test case, Bibliopedia will be designed to work with all humanities scholarship. Bibliopedia will also allow users to create browsable and customizable bibliographies of all the works cited by each article and book. Most importantly, it will use semantic web technology to perform automated textual analysis, data extraction, cross-referencing, and visualizations of the relationships among texts and authors.

Bibliopedia will crawl, aggregate, cross-reference, and display multiple scholarly repositories such as JSTOR, Library of Congress, Project Muse, and Google Books. The project will transform bibliographic data that is currently readable only by humans into machine-readable data via semantic web technology, which will make scholarly resources available for automated analyses, inferences, and visualizations.