Loretta Auvil was invited to participate in the 2011 Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR) Conference held in Raleigh, NC on February 24-27, 2011. CAR is a journalism conference that focuses on digital reporting with the use of tools and technology for data driven analysis. The panel on Visualizing Text was shared with Brant Houston of University of Illinois and John Stasko of Georgia Tech. Loretta briefly introduced the SEASR project and Meandre with several demonstrations of applications of visualizing text. The slides can be found at the link below.

http://dev-tools.seasr.org/confluence/download/attachments/6979872/CAR2011public.pptx

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a two-year grant to Stanford University with collaborators: Mike Keller, Matthew Jockers and Franco Moretti from Stanford University; John Unsworth, Michael Welge and Ted Underwood from the University of Illinois; Dan Cohen from George Mason University; and Tanya Clement from the University of Maryland.

This team of researchers will explore text-mining as a tool for understanding the humanities and will focus on using SEASR/Meandre to solve the particular use cases.

Other web postings about the grant:

http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers/cgi-bin/drupal/node/51

http://www.lis.illinois.edu/articles/2010/10/mellon-grant-expand-text-mining-research-unsworth-and-team

http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/soda/seasr.html

I attended ThatCamp London in June that incorporated a Developers Challenge. So I (with a little help from Boris Capitanu) decided to participate and leverage existing SEASR/Meandre flows that we have created in order to demonstrate how they could be used to create a mashup. I chose to use the Victoria and Albert Museum Collections data because they created an API to access their data. I created two new components. One to process and query the API iteratively until all results are retrieved. The second one is more generic for selecting specific json fields from the data.

I modified 4 existing web service enabled flows to use these components to retrieve the data and create the visualizations. Once I had the 4 flows functioning separately, I created an html page that passes the search query to each flow and create the visualizations for the mashup. The first view is a tagcloud of the description of the objects that satisfy the query. The second view is a ngram tagcloud of the historical significance attribute of the objects. The third applies entity extraction to the data, extracting the location and plotting these locations on a map, where the sentences containing the locations can be read. The fourth one also applies entity extraction and extracts people, organizations and locations and creates links between entities that coexist within 2 sentences. This was just a quick prototype to showcase the capabilities of the Meandre environment for a mashup. So ultimately these flows could be optimized for performance.

I put together a screencast in a short time frame to satisfy the Challenge deadline. So the video is not polished because there was no time for editing or tweaking the search term. Thus, here is the video in its raw form. The good news was that I received an Honorable Mention for the submission, “… with a neat SEASR flow that used the API from the Victoria and Albert Museum and visualized searches in multiple ways.” The winner announcement for the Developer Challenge is here.

We created a movie that highlights some of the projects and groups using the SEASR technology. Check out http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/SEASR-Nov-2009.m4v for more details. We will plan to update this movie periodically. If you are using SEASR, please let us know, so that we can incorporate your work.

Meandre 1.4.7 was released today, November 3, 2009. This is the last and most stable release in the 1.4 series before we move onto big changes for the 1.5 series. Version 1.4.7 has a few new features and numerous bug fixes and usability improvements.

As usual, the Download page now points to this stable release:

http://seasr.org/meandre/download/

The raw artifacts are available at the SEASR repository:

http://repository.seasr.org/Meandre/Releases/1.4/1.4.7/

Visible changes since 1.4.5 (Version 1.4.6 was an internal release):

• Meandre server can now load flows from the network and then be restarted and run offline.

• Improvements to the Meandre Administrative Interface for user accounts.

• Allow specification of the port when running a flow from the ZigZag console.

• Performance improvement on component installation by using MD5 checksums to check whether a particular resource already exist on the meandre server.

• When regenerating, downloading jar files is skipped if they already exist on the meandre server.

• Bug fixes.

Last night, I created a movie that walks through the process of installing the SEASR/Meandre tools and shows how to run the tools. You can check out the movie at http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/SEASR_Install_and_Run.m4v. If you listen closely you might even hear my puppy squeak a toy.

Loretta Auvil of the SEASR Team participated in a workshop at Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT) at the University of Boulder on August 13, 2009. The workshop focused on the SEASR Analytics for Zotero, but also introduced the use of SEASR analytics for researchers data.

The presentation can be found here.

Loretta Auvil of the SEASR Team will be participating in a workshop at Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT). The workshop takes place at the University of Boulder on August 13, 2009 from 1:30-3:45pm. The workshop will focus on SEASR Analytics for Zotero. You can register for the event at the COLTT website above.

This presentation will highlight the integration of two powerful tools–Zotero for data management and SEASR for analytics. Zotero was developed at the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University, and is a tool aimed at facilitating a user’s research process by providing mechanisms for collecting, managing, and citing Internet resources (websites, articles, books, etc.). Zotero functions as an extension of the popular open-source browser Firefox. One of the key features provided by Zotero is the ability to automatically extract metadata from online resources as part of the resource collection process and to store it conveniently. Zotero also provides advanced tagging and searching functionality, allowing the user to organize, find, and visualize the collected resources effortlessly.

SEASR provides a semantic-enabled web-driven dataflow-execution environment that allows others to create their own analytical components. The initial analytics are meant to be demonstrations to show capabilities such as tag cloud generation, sentence summarization, entity extraction, and citation network analysis of the selected data assets. Additional text analysis capabilities are forthcoming. SEASR provides analytics to enhance scholars’ use of digital materials by helping them uncover hidden information and connections, supporting the study of assets from small patterns drawn from a single text or chunk of text to broader entity categories and relations across a million words or a million books. These analytics are also provided as a Firefox extension. This application allows researchers to use the SEASR analytical tools with their Zotero assets in a straightforward way.

Bernie Ács of the SEASR Team made a remote presentation for the NINES/18th Connect Workshop held in Dublin on July 15, 2009. The presentation included an overview of the SEASR project. Also in remote attendance were Loretta Auvil and Xavier Llorà of the SEASR Team.

The presentation is available here.

Loretta Auvil, Boris Capitanu, and Amit Kumar of the SEASR Team participate in THATCamp 2009 at George Mason University on June 27-29, 2009. We had the opportunity to have a session on SEASR Analytics. We also had the opportunity to discuss SEASR with many humanities researchers.