SuperCell call
Attending: John Unsworth, Steve Ramsay, Martin Mueller, Stan Ruecker, Catherine Plaisant
Not attending: Matt Kirschenbaum,

Agenda items:

• Annual reporting
• Outcomes of hackfest
• Shifting needs for person-hours on different parts of the project
• Status of use cases

Annual Reporting

• JMU will need grant funding reports for each campus (actual spending to date). Will send a general reminder to the list.
• Content from IMLS/NEH should cover Abbot, TEI-A, Morphadorner, NuPos; should we have something more about Prior?
• Attachments to the interface cell page covering interface design and workbench architecture
• Paper sent to Candadian Digital Humanities conference could also be used: JMU will ask MONKS to update papers on the public web site
• FeatureLens can also be claimed for MONK (being re-engineered for MONK)
• Carlos' work on visualizing statistical information (JMU needs a pointer to this)
• Amit's export to ManyEyes (e.g., Log Likelihood) and Google Charts
• Meander connection (becoming clearer; Sara's use case)
• Ingest workflow (from text through MonkDB, expressed now using a standardized workflow language, JBPM, described by an XML file); it's possible that we may then be able to graft that workflow onto Meander, which would then become the controller for the ingest process)

Lessons learned:

• Some achievements sit partly inside and partly outside of MONK (e.g., Morphadorner, Meander); the need to create simple and interoperable texts is inescapable (and it looks like OCA texts may be the best starting point, for born-in-print documents, starting in mid-18th century, where our need for standardization benefits from the standardization of print culture, in general).
• Face-to-face meetings and face-to-face "hackfests" are a critical part of getting a multi-institutional project to move forward. Phone and emails are useful, and MONK's organization does a better job than we did in NORA at organizing the project so as to isolate dependencies, and architectural decisions can get made by email and on the wiki, but rapid prototyping and rapid iterations have to happen face to face, really. Coming to the meeting ready to code is key. Also, it's much easier to detect real commitments and discard apparent ones.

Hackfest

See Stan's report under Meetings. Stan needs reimbursement for food (JMU will check on that); facility worked well. Next hackfest: April 15-17. Location? Vegas?

Shifting personnel needs? We certainly need more of the following:

• Javascript programming, especially with interface: Alejandro (part-time spring, full-time summer?)
• Student money from Nebraska could go to Stan's group, or could go to Sara (duties and objectives need to be proposed)
• ManyEyes? Could we get Chris Mackie to throw a little funding and weight?
• Documentation? It should be available to all, in language that can be understood by all.

Use cases

• Sara has something workable in Meander on Tuesday, and soon (we hope) through the MONK interface
• Kristin: Witchcraft texts are coming online soon; browsing with Mandala