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

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

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/

The SEASR Team will participate in University of Victoria’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute on June 7-11, 2010. You can find information at http://www.dhsi.org/. The course entitled “SEASR in Action: Data Analytics for Humanities Scholar” will be taught by Loretta Auvil and Boris Capitanu.

The course will provide an introduction to the SEASR analytics with hands-on training with the tools.

We created a movie that highlights some of the projects and groups using the SEASR technology. Check out http://repository.seasr.org/Movies/SEASR-Nov-2009.m4v for more details. We will plan to update this movie periodically. If you are using SEASR, please let us know, so that we can incorporate your work.

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.

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.