Loretta Auvil attends Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 2011 which occurred Nov. 20-21, 2011. With many of the collaborators from the SEASR Services project, a set of demonstrations were prepared as part of the Software Demonstration program. Our work with Matt Jockers from Stanford prompted the Topic Modeling demonstration. Our work with Ted Underwood on the Google Ngrams data and correlation analysis prompted the development of the web application, “Correlation Analysis and Ngram Viewer“. A paper describing the demonstration, “SEASR Analytics” is available here.

Ted Underwood, one of our collaborators on the SEASR Services project, also attended and presented,
“Combining topic-modeling and time-series approaches to reveal trends in 18th- and 19th-century discourse.” This paper is also available here.

The University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) was held on June 6-10, 2011. Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu taught the course entitled “SEASR in Action: Data Analytics for Humanities Scholar”. The slides and course materials for this workshop are at http://dev-tools.seasr.org/confluence/display/Outreach/DHSI-SEASR-2011.

The course covered the following topics: Overview of SEASR infrastructure (components, flows, applications), Introduction to text mining tools, and Using and creating Zotero flows, Topic Modeling and Concept Mapping.

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 SEASR Team will participate in University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute on June 7-11, 2010. You can find information at http://www.dhsi.org/. The course entitled “SEASR in Action: Data Analytics for Humanities Scholar” will be taught by Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu.

The course will provide an introduction to the SEASR analytics with hands-on training with the tools.

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.

Loretta Auvil of the SEASR Team presented an overview of SEASR at the Digital Humanities 101: Rethinking the Scholarly Enterprise Workshop at University of North Caroloina, Charlotte. The workshop was held by the Center for Humanities, Technology and Science on Friday, Oct. 9, 2009.

This workshop introduced faculty members to new research tools and approaches as well as funding opportunities available through the field of digital humanities. Guest speakers included Loretta Auvil, director of Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research; Kurt Fendt, director of HyperStudio at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Jason Rhody, project officer with the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities; and Stan Ruecker, co-director of the Humanities Computing program at the University of Edmonton.

The presentation slides for SEASR can be found here.

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 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.

The SEASR Team held a Follow-up SEASR Workshop on the Monday, June 22, 2009 of Digital Humanities 2009 week. Loretta Auvil and Bernie Ács presented updates to the SEASR project. We had presentations from Andrew Ashton of Brown University, Clare Lewellyn and Michael Krot of JSTOR, Anoop Kumar of Tufts (VUE), and Susan Schreibman of Digital Humanities Observatory.

The presentation materials are available at http://dev-tools.seasr.org/confluence/display/Outreach/June2009Follow-up.