The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a two-year grant to Stanford University with collaborators: Mike Keller, Matthew Jockers and Franco Moretti from Stanford University; John Unsworth, Michael Welge and Ted Underwood from the University of Illinois; Dan Cohen from George Mason University; and Tanya Clement from the University of Maryland.

This team of researchers will explore text-mining as a tool for understanding the humanities and will focus on using SEASR/Meandre to solve the particular use cases.

Other web postings about the grant:

http://www.stanford.edu/~mjockers/cgi-bin/drupal/node/51

http://www.lis.illinois.edu/articles/2010/10/mellon-grant-expand-text-mining-research-unsworth-and-team

http://cirss.lis.illinois.edu/soda/seasr.html

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 participated in a workshop at Colorado Learning and Teaching with Technology Conference (COLTT) at the University of Boulder on August 13, 2009. The workshop focused on the SEASR Analytics for Zotero, but also introduced the use of SEASR analytics for researchers data.

The presentation can be found here.

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.

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.