Picking up the Threads

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Sometimes it's a shock to look back and see how long it's been since your last post. BUT I'm reviving this blog in order to start documenting this summer's digital projects.

Last summer I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria and took a workshop with Loretta Avuil and Boris Capitanu on the SEASR Project and MEANDRE software. You've probably heard of SEASR through its Zotero plugin, but SEASR/MEANDRE are also what provided the front-in analysis tools for the MONK project. The workshop was a blast (bunnies everywhere), but I was very happy to have Loretta and Boris there to get me up and running. MEANDRE is designed to make it easier for scholars like me to assemble programs -- it has a visual programming interface that allows you to point and click to assemble code -- but it's hard to figure out without some guidance. Last summer a group of us from the Workshop got together to start a Google Docs collection that would contain expanded documentation for MEANDRE, and it's still in the works, though it languished a bit during the academic year. More on that anon.

This summer, I've got a couple of new digital projects in mind that I'd like to use Meandre for. But they are larger-scale, and I've been mulling over ways to get Meandre up and running on resources larger than the old Linux laptop I took out to DHSI last year. So one of the projects I've worked on over the last couple of weeks was getting Meandre up and running as an Amazon Cloud instance. The Amazon Cloud allows you to launch virtual linux servers on the fly, modify them, use them, and save and shut them down. You're only charged while the server is up and running. And the first Micro instance is free. It's a scalable system, too, so you can ramp up the computing power based on your need. It was the perfect solution for a digital humanist on a limited budget.

In the next post, I'm going to describe what I did to get the Amazon instance up and running with a working Meandre Infrastructure server, using my work pc as a client Workbench. It took some fiddling, but everything now seems to be working as well as it did on my PC, with some gains in processing speed.