David Tcheng and Amit Kumar represented SEASR project at the 19 June 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries “Workshop On Integrating Digital Library Content with Computational Tools and Services” workshop. The two workshops presented were “SEASR & Meandre for Second Generation Digital Libraries” and “NESTER – Web Based Waveform Analysis with Meandre”.
The presentation abstracts are available here and here.
The powerpoint presentation for the SEASR & Meandre for Second Generation Digital Libraries is available here.
We had 15 students registered for the course. The course covered the following topics: Overview of SEASR infrastructure (components, flows, applications), Introduction to text mining tools, and Using and creating Zotero flows.
The SEASR Team participated in HASTAC by hosting a workshop on the SEASR project. The workshop included informational sessions about SEASR and applications using SEASR as well as a hands on session. Presentations include:
As part of Kevin Franklin’s Afro 498: Introduction to Advanced Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science course at UIUC, the SEASR Team was invited to offer an introductory session on text analytics and SEASR as well as a hands-on session with SEASR that would allow students to explore the software. Introduction to Advanced Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science explores the intersection of cutting-edge computing technologies and humanities, arts, and social science disciplines. This course aims to give students intensive hands-on experience with advanced computing infrastructures and applications being utilized in research and learning in African-American Studies and the study of the African Diaspora.
Loretta gave the presentation below on Feb 4, 2009 for this class.
SEASR Team members, Loretta Auvil and Bernie Ács attended and participated in the 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science in Indianapolis, IN. Bernie presented our paper called “Meandre: Semantic-Driven Data-Intensive Flows in the Clouds” by Xavier Llorà, Bernie Ács, Loretta Auvil, Boris Capitanu, Michael Welge, and David Goldberg.
Abstract: Data-intensive flow computing allows efficient processing of large volumes of data otherwise unapproachable. This paper introduces a new semantic-driven data-intensive flow infrastructure which: (1) provides a robust and transparent scalable solution from a laptop to large-scale clusters, (2) creates an unified solution for batch and interactive tasks in high-performance computing environments, and (3) encourages reusing and sharing components. Banking on virtualization and cloud computing techniques, the Meandre infrastructure is able to create and dispose Meandre clusters on demand, being transparent to the final user. This paper also presents a prototype of such clustered infrastructure and some results obtained using it. The slide presentation is included below. The paper can be downloaded here. The video of the eScience 2008 presentations is now available on the conference web site www.escience2008.iu.edu. To see this presentation, click here.
We presented SEASR and Meandre with an introduction to Text Mining at a workshop sponsored by ICHASS (Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science) on July 28, 2008. “This workshop, Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching, aims to give humanities, arts, and social science faculty, researchers and students intensive hands-on experience for improving the quality of their work through access to advanced computing infrastructures and applications.”
Also during this workshop, we held a hands on lab where attendees used the Meandre Workbench to perform some text analysis.
Loretta Auvil was invited to present the keynote address at the Text Mining Workshop 2008, which was held in conjunction with the Eighth SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2008) in Atlanta, GA on April 26, 2008. Her presentation title echoes SEASR’s identifying phrase, ”Engineering Knowledge for the Humanities.”
Presentation
Abstract
Over the last decade NCSA’s Automated Learning Group has innovated data mining technologies for industry, government, and the sciences. In the past few years, we have broadened our focus to include knowledge discovery in the humanities. My presentation will focus on how we are negotiating humanities computing’s special challenges for data mining and analysis. I will discuss our early collaborative projects, FeatureLens and Nora, and SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project we are now leading. Each of these projects has developed technologies customized to meet specific needs of the digital humanities community. FeatureLens–an early MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) application–uses the machine learning approach of frequent pattern mining to identify fuzzy repetition patterns in a data collection, and with no initial human input. Nora–a case study for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literature–uses predictive modeling techniques to classify documents, even given complex and notoriously indistinct expert classes such as sentimental fiction. SEASR is our most ambitious project yet, employing a semantic-based, service-oriented architecture to build software bridges that allow users to access data stored in disparate formats and on incompatible platforms and to provide an enhanced environment for workflow and data sharing. The essential infrastructure SEASR provides will advance the capabilities of projects like our partner, MONK, a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns.
