SEASR - Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research

   SEASR

(Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research)

Start Date: August 2007                               URL: http://seasr.org

Project Goals:  Over the past twenty years, the interdisciplinary field of humanities computing has developed tools to support research–from the archiving of electronic texts, images, audio, and email conversations; to the sharing of web-based research sites and exhibitions; to the establishing of electronic discussion lists and research forums; to the publishing of electronic journals; to the creation of ever-more intelligent and refined search tools. The result is a riot of research information and tools, developed in and across a variety of incompatible technical formats and platforms.  The informatics specialists behind SEASR saw the digital humanities’ need for software to bridge these technical gaps: a need for technical and informational exchange. At SEASR, our 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

SEASR will employ a semantic-based, service-oriented architecture to provide humanities computing with a complete, fully integrated, state-of-the-art software environment for managing structured and unstructured data and analyzing digital libraries, repositories and archives, as well as educational platforms. It will be an open source, end-to-end software system that enables researchers to develop, evolve, and maintain data interoperability, evaluation, analysis, and visualization.

SEASR will empower scholars to access existing large data stores more readily; collaborate through innovative virtual research environments; and perform enhanced data synthesis and query analysis: from focused data retrieval and data integration, to intelligent human-computer interactions for knowledge access, to semantic data enrichment, to entity and relationship discovery, to knowledge discovery and hypothesis generation.

Leading Institutions:  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

Michael Welge, . PI, Project and Technical Leadership

Loretta Auvil, . Co-PI, Community Outreach and Applications

Duane Searsmith, dsears@ncsa.uiuc.edu. Technical Lead

Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS)

John Unsworth, . Co-PI and Community Advisor

Project Highlights:  SEASR’s adoption and sustainability depends on providing tools strategized to meet the digital humanities and humanities communities’ needs and crafted to operate efficiently and effectively.  Over the past six months, we have assembled an outstanding development team and embarked on the journey of designing and building this transformational technology.  The team has developed key infrastructure architecture with a semantic web-driven data flow execution environment as well as a developer workbench to create the flows. We have begun the migration of Nora, MONK, and M2K components to SEASR, in addition to the integration of some existing tools, like D2K, Weka and UIMA.

Milestone and Deliverable Essentials:

Completed Milestones

• Problem Solving Layer: Visual environments that turn components and web services into a domain-specific problem solving environment
  • Designed and developed Developer Web Application as early prototype for the workbench
  • Designed and developed Developer Workbench
  • Designed and developed Community Hub web application
• Common Services Layer: Provide execution environment and supporting infrastructure that map from the problem solving layer to the resource layer
  • Designed and developed Meandre (semantic, web-driven data flow execution environment)
  • Designed and developed Meandre components for Nora and MONK partner projects and Fedora data store connection.
  • Designed and began development for importing UIMA components into Meandre
• Resource Layer: Allocation and management of computational resources
  • Installed virtualized computation environment that provides development, testing, and production platforms for SEASR
• Education, Outreach and Training:
  • Held 2 SEASR workshops at the Digital Humanities 2007 Conference to describe the SEASR project and solicit feedback from the community
  • Met with local SEASR advisors (Kevin Franklin, Vernon Burton, Stephen Downie, John Unsworth, Donna Cox) to discuss SEASR work plan and solicit feedback
  • Began Pre-Workshop  and Workshop planning

Future Milestones

• Problem Solving Layer:
  • Continue UI enhancements to Web applications
  • Design and develop an intermediate layer that fits between the Community Hub and the Developer Workbench
• Common Services Layer:
  • Continue adding features to the Meandre data flow environment
  • Design and develop a distributed computing engine for Meandre
  • Design and develop repository discovery
  • Continued analytical component development and integration
  • Provenance and flow monitoring
  • Enhance framework for construction of visual landscapes
• Resource Layer:
  • Maintain and optimize computational and storage environments
• Education, Outreach and Training:
  • Identify external SEASR advisors
  • Hold June SEASR Workshop
  • Continue meeting/discussing SEASR with community

Community:  Because SEASR is a cyberinfrastructure project, we have targeted computational humanists as our primary community, with traditional humanists as a larger, secondary community.  To create a community for SEASR from these potential bases of support, we have participated in conferences to advertise the project, network, and gain feedback (see marketing/evangelism); gathered functional, data-related, user interface and usability requirements; met with local advisors (John Unsworth, Kevin Franklin, Vernon Burton, Stephen Downie, Donna Cox); engaged in collaborative workshop planning, maintained project partnerships; and grown our network through follow-up contacts and partnership discussions (see synergy with other projects).  Not only are our project advisors active members in SEASR’s constituent communities, but our partner projects also connect us to developers and researchers at many institutions.  At MONK, for example, we work closely with, among others, Martin Mueller (Northwestern U.), Catherine Plaisant (U. Maryland), Matthew Kirschenbaum (U. Maryland), Steve Ramsey (U. Nebraska), Stan Ruecker (U. Alberta), Stefan Sinclair (McMaster U.). Our future collaboration with NEMA will involve Stephen Downie (UIUC), Ichiro Fujinaga (McGill U.), David DeRoure (U. Southampton, UK), Mark Sandler (Queen Mary, U. London, UK), Tim Crawford (Goldsmiths, U. London, UK), and David Bainbridge (U. Waikato, NZ).

Sustainability:  In our original proposal for SEASR, our sustainability plan was based on forming a community to extend and support SEASR, encouraging researchers and their supporting institutions to adopt SEASR prior to its formal release (see synergy with other projects).  We continue to advance along those lines.

Recently, however, we have been invited to participate in a major opportunity that, as it goes forward, will mean significant longevity for the project.  The Provost of UIUC, Linda Katehi, is spearheading an initiative to address the unmet research needs of scholars who deal with digital assets.  She has formed an expert team that is mirrored at two partner institutions: the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and Penn State.  These teams will strategize and then put into place a plan to provide scholars on their campuses with repositories for the preservation of research data, new publishing products and services, new library services, and an incubator for cyberinfrastructure that can spread to other data communities (the part SEASR would play).  Initial data communities being considered are Literature; Art and Architecture; and Music.  The Provost’s vision is to expand these services to all CIC member institutions.   

Marketing/Evangelism:  SEASR’s 2007 marketing efforts include a website and conference participation in the US and UK aimed at identifying user needs, promoting the project, networking within the digital humanities community, and identifying and engaging research collaborators in technology and humanities scholarship.  These conferences were: HASTAC Conference (April 19-21, 2007, Durham, NC), e-Science for Arts and Humanities Research: An Early Adopters' Forum (June 1-2, 2007, Urbana, IL), Digital Humanities 2007 (June 4-7, 2007, Urbana, IL): SEASR BOF, UK e-Science All Hands Meeting 2007 (September 9-13,2007, Nottingham, England): SEASR presentation, Third International Conference on E-Social Science (October 8-9, 2007, Ann Arbor, MI), Chicago Digital Humanities Colloquium (October 21-22, 2007, Chicago, IL), IEEE VIS 2007 (October 27-November 1, 2007, Sacramento, CA), Service Oriented Computing in the Humanities (December 17-18, 2007, London, England): SEASR presentation.  In addition, we have actively participated in the MONK project, including weekly collaborative cell calls, a hackfest, and an All Hands meeting.  In the coming year, we will continue this pattern of presenting the project, networking with members of the community, contributing to partner projects, and engaging new partners and researchers.

In December 2007, we also contributed to a special issue of Academic Commons on Cyberinfrastructure and the Liberal Arts, to which SEASR was invited by editor David L. Green (Knowledge Culture) to provide a project description for a list of leading digital humanities cyberinfrastructure organizations and networks.

In the coming year, we will step up our efforts to engage the humanities and digital humanities communities by holding SEASR workshops in collaboration with ICHASS (Institue for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science).  Beginning in March, project leaders (selected to represent a range of digital humanities approaches, from multi-media objects to text-based library archives) will visit with us to utilize SEASR to design and develop an application for their research needs.  In addition to MONK and NEMA project researchers, we have invited Global Middle Ages (Susan Noakes, U. Minnesota; Geraldine Heng, U. Texas-Austin; Ayhan Aytes, U. California-San Diego), Peace and Nonviolence (Heidi Beirich, Southern Poverty Law Center; Steven Valdivia, Crisis Intervention Network-LA; Fernando Hernandez, California State U.-Los Angeles), and New Media and Learning Digital Portfolio (Virginia Kuhn, U. Southern California; Cheryl Ball, Illinois State U.; and Elijah Wright, Indiana U.).  In June, these leaders will present their SEASR applications to a larger group of selected project leaders, some of which our initial leaders will recommend and others of which we will identify.  At this June workshop, we will discuss how SEASR can meet research needs, as well as continue to identify user needs that we can address in our development. 

Should our proposed collaboration with The National Centre for Text Mining receive support, we will also co-organize two international workshops (one in the US, one in the UK), structured similarly to our June 2008 workshop described above.  At the workshop, project results will be presented to the wider Arts and Humanities communities.  The aim will be to expose users to the tools developed throughout this project and to encourage their adoption. 

Synergy with Other Projects:  SEASR is currently partnered with the MONK and NEMA projects (NEMA, the sequel to M2K, was recently awarded funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation).  We are discussing collaborations and proposals with The National Centre for Text Mining (Sophia Ananiadou, John McNaught, U. Manchester), Mark Hedges and Tobias Blanke (King’s College London), Vernon Burton (UIUC), Kirsten Uszkalo (St. Francis Xavier U.), and Natasha Smith and Hugh Cayless (U. North Carolina-Chapel Hill), VUE (David Kahle, Anoop Kumar, Tufts UIT Academic Technology), Clemson University (Jim Bottum, Vice Provost for Computing and IT & CIO; Jill Gemmill, Boyd Wilson), and VisTrails (Juliana Friere, Claudio Silva, U. Utah).  SEASR has made technical use of UIMA, originally developed by IBM.

SEASR has been included as a technology for a Johns Hopkins University-led NSF DataNet proposal (Sayeed Choudhury, Director for Library Digital Programs and Hodson Director of the Digital Knowledge Center, Sheridan Libraries) and the Cultural Computing Project of UIUC’s Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies, which combines a faculty-initiated research in its academic units with the advanced technology capabilities at NCSA.

In the coming year, we intend to engage with UIUC’s newly-formed Digital Media Initiative focused on Arts and Technology (led by Donna Cox) and digital humanities projects even more actively, sharing essential technologies and discussing strategies for further development and community-building efforts. Projects we have already identified include Many Eyes from IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group (Matt Wattenberg, Fernanda Viégas), Fedora, Fluid, and Bamboo.