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.

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.

The SEASR Team will participate in University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute on June 8-12, 2009.  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.

This course focuses on introducing participants to The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, SEASR, providing humanities, arts, and social science communities a transformational cyberinfrastructure technology. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about SEASR through a comprehensive set of presentations and hands-on exercises meant to outline the key aspects of the technology and how it can be applied to solve real-world research problems. SEASR eases scholars’ access to digital research materials and enhances scholars’ use of them through analytics that can uncover hidden information and connections. SEASR fosters collaboration, too, through empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual work environments. SEASR technology is also designed to enable digital humanities developers to design, build, and share software applications that support research and collaboration. Developers can tailor applications both in whole and part to fit scholars’ research needs—from changing the visualization landscapes that provide them with views of analytical results, to inserting new analytics that support their linguistic analysis for different time periods or languages, to readjusting entire steps in the work process so that researchers can validate results and alter their queries. The course will incorporate a variety of learning activities ranging from presentations to structured application sessions to designing specialized analyses. Topics will include: Overview of SEASR infrastructure (components, flows, applications), Introduction to text mining tools, and Using and creating Zotero flows.

SEASR co-PI Loretta Auvil will participate in the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo Workshop. With other higher education; museum and library; and organization, society, and agency leaders from across the U.S., she will attend the second session of The Planning Process & Understanding Arts and Humanities Scholarship workshop, which will be held from May 15-17, 2008 at the University of Chicago.

SEASR is twice mentioned in the Project Bamboo proposal, which sets as its goal formulating a strategic plan for enhancing the arts and humanities through the “development of shared technology services” (3). As one possible approach, the proposal recommends service-oriented architectures—such as SEASR’s—which emphasize ”being able to re-use and weave together loosely-coupled, discrete, specialized technology services that come from other providers and projects rather than building and managing all on one’s own.” The proposal goes on to say that “Critical to such an approach is the implementation of a web services framework. Such a framework is not a vertical application that focuses on a single in-depth function or a self-contained software tool used directly by a user, but rather a horizontally integrating set of technologies and set of core shared capabilities that enable the creation, aggregation, and reuse of services and resources among scholars, projects, and institutions” (15-16). The passage notes SEASR’s special strength in data analysis and mining tools.

In imagining a vision of the humanities researcher of the future and her work process, the Bamboo proposal turns to SEASR once again, envisioning a synthetic Bamboo composer that uses a visual programming environment similar to the one SEASR uses today in its workbench (20).

At Digital Humanities 2007 (the annual joint conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing), Loretta Auvil and Duane Searsmith introduced SEASR at two BOFs. Participants were eager to know what analytics contributions SEASR would make to existing applications in the humanities, from linguistics to interpretation.

Digital Humanities 2007 was held June 2-8 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference was hosted by the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), in cooperation with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Center for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (CHASS).