Changes

'''ActiveSierra ''' - Sean Crowe and James Van Mil: while waiting for a useful API from III, we've modeled useful bits of the Sierra database for use in Rails apps and in vanilla ruby. We'd be able to present the SierraDNA and ActiveRecord/ActiveModel frameworks with some of the tools we're building (~1 hour?). If folks have access to their home III database systems, we could also host a workshop/hackfest around these tools.

'''Text mining: An introduction ''' - This hands-on workshop will introduce participants to the use of Python's Natural Language Toolkit ([http://www.nltl.org NLTK]), and through this process participants will learn the rudiments of text mining. While it may sound trivial, the workshop will count and tabulate words. How many words are in a given document? What are those words, and how often do they occur? How significant are those words compared to a similar sent in a different document? Visualize the comparison. Identify where selected words appear in a document and visualize that. After identifying significant words in a text, use a simple keyword-in-context (concordance) application to understand who the words are used in the text. Using these simple techniques a person can "read" a large corpuse of materials quickly and easily.