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.

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.