February 4 Conference call
Steve Ramsay, Matt Kirschenbaum, Stan Ruecker, Martin Mueller, John Unsworth, Bill Parod

Hackfest update

People will arrive on the 7th, leave on the 10th. JU will put up logistical information on the wiki. Amit's bringing a hub. Need to hear back from Loretta, but all others have tasks they have already started:

• Amit: proxy calls, sort returns on search results
• James: JSON
• John, Steve, Brian: ingestion routines and JBPM conversion, talk to Bill about Fedora
• Andrew, Matt: Workbench and tools (what's the dividing line?)
• Mike Plouffe: embedding other things into the workbench
• Alejandro: search at the workbench level, so that active tools respond appropriately (probably the most recently active, with a toggle for all); will work with Amit on exporting CSV
• Carlos: to provide design bits for interface and looking at the statistical visualization
• Piotr: text visualization (Tanya's repetition case)
• Milena: how will toolsets look like when they're open
• Catherine: work with Loretta on documentation for the wiki, also on design.
• Stan: will provide coffee and inspiration
• Martin will come in on Sunday for the wrap-up Sunday at lunch.

Mandala browser

Stefan and Stan have been working on this for a while, looking at large-scale collection visualization. Just got a one-year grant to extend this; might become a tool within the workbench, leveraging about three years of development. Possible use cases: Stan has a colleague looking at plays (kinship reference; transitive verbs as a marker of the speaker's power, etc.) Not just for results--visualizations should also be for exploration (interactive).

IMLS/NEH grant conversation

"Advancing Knowledge" program, deadline March 18. Two years, max $350K. We're contemplating a three-part proposal:

• TEI-A ingest, with a connector to OCA output, so that we could hoover up OCA, through Abbot and Prior, into a MONK datastore. Doing the more robust JBPM version, as a web service. End-user upload connector needs to be part of this as well. Possibly a Gutenberg connector as well. TEI workgroup connected with this one--with some consulting from Syd Bauman.

• Extend morphadorner, develop a large dictionary to deal with different kinds of text, develop different training sets for different texts, different name-entity extractors, etc. Swappable in SEASR?

• Volunteer editing: disambiguating words, correcting texts, etc., leveraging work that James has been doing with the Russell project. See also above, "user-uploaded texts".

Bring these things together-perhaps under SEASR-to create text corpora that meet scholarly requirements. We're contemplating putting this in through TEI, as well.

SEASR/MONK meeting report

ALG is focused on the Mellon infrastructure meeting, but they do have some pieces coming that we can draw on. JU will try to get sketches out to MONK. JU suggested to Michael and Loretta that Chris Mackie could help to put some pressure on ManyEyes for the API. Matt will set up a conference call with Martin W. for late February, to pursue this problem as well.