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.

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.

On May 11 and 12, 2009 Loretta Auvil, Bernie Acs, and Xavier Llorà worked with a research group led by UIUC Professor Brant Houston. Others joining include David Donald, Jennifer LaFleur, and Jaimi Dowdell.

This was a follow-up workshop from our meeting in January. In the workshop the SEASR staff worked with the researchers to apply existing SEASR tools and to identify other needed tools. The workshop was a success in getting the Journalism group moving toward their goals and to identify specific analysis to target. Additionally, SEASR staff have identified needed changes in their components and flows that will result in adjustments and further development.

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

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.

Text Mining Presentation

SEASR Presentation

SEASR/Meandre Hands on Presentation

The SEASR development team is hard at work preparing a release of SEASR technologies to date.  The release will include SEASR’s semantic-web, data-driven execution engine, Meandre, as well as components, flows, clients, and plug-ins that will help humanities scholars and programmers to make better and easier use of digital archives and humanities computing resources.  Check back for a release date and news!

Welcome to SEASR.ORG, the web home of the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR).   Funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, SEASR’s mission is to support knowledge discovery in the Humanities by advancing and innovating data-mining tools for analyzing large bodies of information, building software bridges for communicating between applications, and creating enhanced environments for technology and information sharing.

Developed by the informatics experts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Graduate School of Library and Information Science, SEASR aims to make an essential contribution to the “development of a robust cyberinfrastructure…imperative for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences” (6) called for by Our Cultural Commonwealth: The Report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006).SEASR was initiated in June 2007.

The project’s principal investigators are the University of Illinois’s Michael Welge, NCSA/GSLIS; Loretta Auvil, NCSA; and John Unsworth, GSLIS. Other key project staff include technical lead Duane Searsmith, NCSA; usability evaluator Tara Bazler, Indiana University; and community advisor Tim Cole, University of Illinois.