Session Title: Meandre Workbench

Importance of the Topic

In the context of the Meandre environment flows play a central role, orchestrating the work that needs to be performed by the various components to carry out a particular task. Typically, researchers use (and may construct) flows that allow them to extract/compute/visualize interesting information from their data sets. The Meandre Workbench provides a drag-and-drop visual environment for creating and executing flows.

Focus of the Topic

Upon completion of this session, participants will:

• Understand the notion of "Location" as a mechanism for importing external components and flows
• Be able to add, remove, rename, connect, disconnect components in a flow, and change their properties
• Be able to construct and execute flows
• Be able to navigate and customize the Workbench interface

Format of the Session

• Presentation
• Demonstration
• Learning Exercise
• Discussion Questions
• Summary and Review

Presentation

• Slides can be found at http://dev-tools.seasr.org/confluence/display/Outreach/Presentations
• User Manual for Meandre Workbench can be found at http://seasr.org/meandre/documentation/tools-manual/meandre-workbench/

Demonstration

• We will be demonstrating the use of the Workbench for creating flows
  • Use TagCloudViewer as an example and explain how it was created

Learning Exercises

• Explore the functionality of the Meandre Workbench
• Usage of existing components to create a data-driven flow for creating a basic Tag Cloud Viewer flow so they can become familiar with the mechanics of drag-drop, creating connections, setting properties, saving, executing
  1. Retrieve text from a url
  2. Count the words
  3. Visualize with the Tag Cloud Viewer
• Improve the Tag Cloud Flow that you created to "clean" it up a bit
  1. Filter HTML tags from the text
  2. Convert all words to lower case
  3. Remove stop words
  4. Filter to specific number of words

Discussion Questions

• What are three advantages of using a component driven environment for text analytics?
• What are the possible obstacles for humanities scholars in using an environment like the Meandre Workbench to assemble and create flows for accomplishing their research needs?
• Are there parts of the workbench that are unclear or that need extra explanation?
• Do you have any feature requests?
• Are there any tools that you would like to see componentized such that you can work with these tools in the Meandre Workbench?

Summary and Review