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

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.

Meandre 1.4.8 was released for DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute). This is the last and most stable release in the 1.4 series before we move onto big changes for the 2.0 series. Version 1.4.8 includes stability and performance improvements. Several new flows were created with this release.

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/1.4/1.4.8/

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.

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.

Meandre 1.4.5 was released today, May 19, 2009. This is (hopefully) the last and most stable release in the 1.4 series before we move onto big changes for the 1.5 series. Version 1.4.5 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/1.4/1.4.5/

Visible changes since 1.4.4:

• Workbench now supports flows written in ZigZag
• Workbench can output flows to the .mau format
• Bug fixes in the job submission API for flows that finish quickly
• Flow RDF representations can be converted to ZigZag
• Infrastructure web API and HTML interface added “Publish All” ability
• Bug fixes for multiple users running the same flow
• Stack trace is now printed for the failing Component when a Flow execution aborts unexpectedly

The following presentations were given at the Pathways to SEASR Workshop on March 6 at Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

SEASR Overview

SEASR Applications: Zotero

SEASR Applications: Text

SEASR Applications: Audio

SEASR Applications: Discus

SEASR Architecture

SEASR Tools

A new release of the Meandre infrastructure and tools is available. More information here.

The SEASR Team has created the next release of infrastructure and components. This release focused on the execution engine, development environments, components, documentation, and examples. The release includes:

• Meandre Infrastructure – execution environment and administrative interface
• Meandre Development Eclipse plug-in – tool for installing components
• Meandre Workbench – visual icon-based programming environment
• Meandre Zig-Zag – development scripting language
• Community Hub : Keyword Cloud – end-user gateway to published applications (flows)
• Component and flow repositories

Our goal with this release was to reach developers who want to create new component and begin application development with the SEASR environment. We encourage you to download and provide us feedback.

To download SEASR/Meandre, Components and Examples, click here. Documentation is available, and inside behind the scenes is also available on our development wiki.