Here at NCSA, with the Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research, SEASR, we’re answering the humanities community’s call for a research and development environment capable of powering leading edge digital humanities initiatives.

This Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded project is developing transformation cyberinfrastructure technology, tools, to rapidly overcome opportunities in a rapidly changing environment of the early 21st century.

SEASR fosters collaboration through empowering scholars to share data and research in virtual work environments. By doing so, SEASR eases scholar’s access to digital research materials, now stored in a variety of incompatible formats.

Developed in partnership with humanities scholars, SEASR analytics enhances scholars’ use of digital materials through 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. Initially, SEASR will support numerical, categorical, text, and audio-based analysis, but eventually these capabilities will extend to images and moving images.

SEASR seeks forward thinking humanist looking to be part of the development and application of this new human-center information technology.

Check out our example flows.

SEASR is also designed to enable digital humanities developers to rapidly design, build, and share software applications that support research and collaboration. Developers can tailor applications both in the whole or in the part to fit scholars’ research objectives.

Developers can change the visualization landscapes that provide views of analytics results, to inserting new analytics that support linguistic analysis for different time periods or languages, to readjusting entire steps in the work process so that researchers can validate results from their queries. Developers can even integrate components from other programming environments.

We encourage humanities scholars and digital humanities experts and developers to contribute to the SEARS component and application repositories. If you would like to help shape the development or adapt the SEASR technology to your research project, please contact us.

Check here for details.