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.

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 presentation can be found here.

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.

The presentation is available here.

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.