This document discusses the potential for virtual worlds like Second Life to be used for humanities, arts, and social sciences. It provides an overview of the growth of virtual worlds and demographics of Second Life users. Examples are given of various museums, galleries, and educational institutions that have established a virtual presence in Second Life to engage with these fields. The concept of "serious leisure" is introduced as relevant for how participants can engage with humanities content and projects in virtual worlds.

1. Virtual Worlds for the Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Richard Urban (aka Aethalides Kukulcan) Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign http://isrl.uiuc.edu/~rjurban

2. Growth of Virtual Worlds: From…

3. To… International Space Flight Museum

4. Subscriptions to MMOG Courtesy mmogdata.com

5. Second Life Demographics http://secondliferesearch.blogspot.com Residents Logged-In: Last 7 Days: 458,592 Last 14 Days: 637,010 Last 30 Days: 1,031,293 Last 60 Days :1,682,527 Total Residents: 8,350,979 http://www.secondlife.com

9. Science

10. International Space Flight Museum

11. International Space Flight Museum

12. NASA CoLab

13. ‘ Splo (Now Open! Sploland)

14. Art

15. Second Louvre Museum

16. Bolinas Art Museum

17. Fantasy

18. Sci-Fi Museum

19. History/Archeology

20. Second Life Historical Museum

21. Xibalba: Maya Museum

22. Jewish Historical Center

23. Virtual Morocco

24. Literature

25. St. Michael - Jules Verne Museum

26. Globe Theater

27. CHASS and Second Life

28. Stanford Humanities Lab Life to the Second Power

29. New Media Consortium Aho Museum

30. NMC - Dante’s Inferno

31. UCB - Okapi Island

32. Vasser - Sistine Chapel

33. SDSU - Virtual Pow Wow

34. EduServ (UK) - Artsplace

35. EduServ (UK) - SLashup

36. EduServ (UK) - Opac

37. Sculpty Builder

41. Amateurs Professionals Museums

42. Citizen Science