• http://www.seasr.org

The Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research (SEASR) is a software engineering project that is leveraging the latest informatics research to innovate essential technology for a cyberinfrastructure for the humanities. Under the direction of Michael Welge, Loretta Auvil and John Unsworth, the SEASR team is developing software that:

• enhances humanities researchers' ability to use digital humanities applications for knowledge discovery, and
• provides digital humanities developers with an improved environment for advancing and innovating applications.  

SEASR's software research and development environment will enable existing applications (e.g., Wordhoard; Nora; MONK: Metadata Offer New Knowledge; IMIRSEL: International Music Information Retrieval Systems Evaluation Laboratory) to more actively, precisely and comprehensively analyze information extracted from large collections in a variety of formats (i.e., digital libraries, databases, archives, mixed media, and even custom data). SEASR offers a range of data synthesis improvements, 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.  
 
SEASR will also provide an open source, visual programming and component-based space in which digital humanities developers can build new applications through creating, integrating, and deploying their own reusable and extensible software components--as well as leverage those developed by others. In addition, SEASR will support portability and scalability, so that tools can be brought to datasets where they are housed and components can run on a variety of hardware footprints, including shared memory processors and clusters.
 
How can you participate in SEASR? Collaborate on application development and ontology creation. Contribute to component development for analytics and data access. Participate in visualization and UI design. We welcome expert advisors who can help SEASR to make the best possible contributions to the humanities and digital humanities communities. Visit: http://www.seasr.org for contact information.

SEASR was initiated in June 2007 at the University of Illinois National Center for Supercomputing Applications and Graduate School of Library and Information Science.  The project is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Kelly Searsmith is Humanities Domain Expert and Technical Communications Consultant with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.