Present on the call:

• Matt Kirschenbaum, Bill Parod, Amit Kumar, Stan Ruecker, John Unsworth

Absent:

• Martin (in a cave in China), Steve (up to his neck in a Million Books), Catherine (whereabouts unknown)

MK discussed of the Digital Docket project at UMD – text mining/analysis of Supreme Court Decisions. They have NSF funding, and enough extra to fund a GA who might work on helping to develop collaborative tools that would be shared by MONK. JMU noted that a similar project exists here at UIUC, collecting and analyzing the world's constitutions, from the late 18th century to the present, also with NSF funding--they are interested in working with us. BP mentioned Oyez at NWU, http://www.oyez.org, which collects oral arguments in Supreme Court cases, and is also working with NSF (Steve Griffin has them collecting information about "Grand Challenge" problems in humanities and social sciences --JMU). If these projects got serious about a larger scale collaboration, we would probably want to frame that as a SEASR project, but as long as we don't get drawn off our own work, collaboration on smaller sub-projects would be fine.

No report from Analytics cell--though Steve promises by email that his group is working.

Data cell feels that some things are pretty well in hand, among their data cell topics, especially at the word and bibl level. More uncertainty about the n-gram problem; we discussed that, including tactics for building up arbitrary n-grams lengths (1+2=3, 2+2+2=6, etc.), also discussed making use of tagging for some special categories of n-grams like Persnames, Placenames. This led to brief discussion of collaborative tools around the refinement and extension of name authority files that might be extracted based on tagging in large collections. Good collaboration cell project!

Uses and Users: JMU still needs to get in touch with Tim Cole about the curator use case. Catherine we assume is still planning to do storyboarding etc. at the June DH meeting. The first four use cases on the uses and users list are pretty well fleshed out and collaboration, analytics etc. should focus on further developing those before the June DH.

The Interface group is still farily uncertain about what recommendation it will make at the June DH meeting, with respect to a development environment. Discussion of whether John Norstad could put some time into evaluating choices, from the perspective of someone with WordHoard experience, but BP's sense was that he was consumed by his work in the data cell, though not intending to drop out of interface. JMU suggested that perhaps Joe Paris could shift over from data to interface, and provide a little more assistance there. BP suggested that the data object model was really what should be carried forward from WordHoard to MoNK, and that interface aspects of WH that are Swing-dependent don't necessarily migrate. WH could still be available as an interface to a MONK datastore, but MONK interface development would be proxy-server-based, more Nora-like. These decisions need to be agreed upon and understood by all, before we forge ahead with development.

JMU will kick start the disucssion of the teragrid resources, on the list. Stan and Amit will follow up offline on interface.