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.

A new version (0.3.5) of the SEASR Analytics for Zotero Firefox plugin has been released. The new version adds support for Zotero 1.0.* – 2.0b5 and Firefox 2.0 – 3.5.*. A new set of flows (applications) are available, including: Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test, Tag Cloud Viewer, Date Entities to Simile Timeline, HITS Summarizer, and Author Centrality Analysis.

Our user community wanted a different naming strategy, so that one could tell what items were analyzed. If a single item is selected, then the results item maintains the same name as the item. If multiple items are selected, then the results item uses the collection name followed by the number of items selected. In both cases, the name of the service that is executed is provided in the “Creator” attribute. The selected items are also added to the “Related Items” section – a problem with populating these items was also fixed.

We made several changes to improve configuration file specification. One change includes the ability to specify a configuration file in XML format (json support still exists) with additional error messages to indicate problems with parsing your custom configuration file. This configuration file may exist on your local machine and you can use a file browser to find the local file.

The new release can be downloaded at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10020.

A complete list of changes for what is new in version 0.3.5 can be found at http://repository.seasr.org/Zotero/Releases/experimental/0.3/changelog-0.3.5.xhtml.

A new version (0.3.3) of the SEASR Analytics for Zotero Firefox plugin has been recently released. The new version adds support for the beta release of the upcoming Zotero 1.5 The new release can be downloaded here. This release is backward compatible with earlier Zotero versions.

A screencast showing the Firefox plugin for SEASR Analytics for Zotero is available: http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/ZoteroToSEASRanalytics.mov.