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Page history last edited by Alan Liu 9 months, 1 week ago

This is the site for undergraduate Arnhold Collaborative Research Groups (CRGs) in the English Department at University of  California, Santa Barbara, led by Professor Alan Liu.

 

With funding from UCSB Trustee and English Department alumnus John Arnhold ('75), the English Department inaugurated in 2016-17 a number of CRGs to enrichen undergraduate learning with opportunities to train in research skills in collaboration with faculty and graduate students. These project groups consist of teams of undergraduates under the supervision of a faculty member and a graduate-student Arnhold Collaborative Research Adviser. Undergraduates conduct research and project-making activities that, while linked to the faculty member's research interests, are primarily for the benefit of students.

 

2016-2017 CRG: Making the Humanities Public

Value for Students

The Making the Humanities Public project will add to student learning for English majors and others in the following ways:

  • Students will be introduced to data-assisted methods of textual and media research.
  • Students will learn to extend their critical/interpretive skills to the forms and content of journalistic media, the Internet, political discourse, business discourse, and other discursive domains of today's "public."
  • Students will gain an overview of today's evolving idea of the public and of the role that higher education, the humanities, the sciences, and the arts play in the making of that public.
  • Students will study and practice key forms of public argumentation, including forms originating in print media such as press releases, op-eds,  infographics, etc., and born-digital forms such as blogs, storymaps, and social media campaigns.

The Making the Humanities Public project may especially interest English majors considering careers in journalism, media, advertising, public communications, public policy, government, etc.


Participants |  Meetings | Resources | Outputs


One of the English Department's CRGs in academic year 2016-17 is Making the Humanities Public. Directed by Professor Liu with Jamal Russell serving as graduate-student Arnhold Collaborative Research Adviser, this group will work on research and project-making related to the international humanities advocacy initiative that Liu founded called 4Humanities.org. Scheduled over two quarters (Winter, Spring), the project group is structured to allow (at the option of individual students) for coordination with UCSB's English 199RA and Undergraduate Research & Creative Activities (URCA) mechanisms for awarding additional course credit and/or individual funding for undergraduate research.

The goal of the Making the Humanities Public CRG is to build on previous 4Humanities research to make a rare student-to-public intervention in today's debates about the value of the humanities in society. The starting point for student work in the group will be research outcomes from the already in-progress 4Humanities WhatEvery1Says project (WE1S). WE1S is a collaborative undertaking in which UCSB faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates participate with peers at other institutions. It uses computational means to gather and analyze media discussion of the humanities at "big data" scales. To date, the project has harvested and prepared for data-analysis a corpus of over 36,000 articles related to the humanities from selected major newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and U.K. Some of this corpus, which currently spans from 1981 to 2014, spotlights the humanities under such headlines as "Humanities in Crisis," while other portions of the corpus represent "ambient" public discussion of the humanities (background mentions of the humanities in the course of discussions of society, politics, economics, war, and individual human lives).

Students in the Making the Humanities Public CRG will begin with a "starter set" of research produced by WE1S. This starter set will consist of:

  • "Topic models" and visualizations of WE1S's corpus (computationally-assisted analyses of discourse themes and their interrelations). Prof. Liu and Jamal Russell will teach students about topic modeling and related digital research methods now being used both in scholarship and in journalism.
  • An anthology of selected articles from the corpus representing spome main topics (and outlier topics) in public discussion of the humanities (as identified by the topic model).
  • A "handbook on the humanities" consisting of definitions of the humanities, citations on the history and recent evolution of the humanities, foundation reports about the humanities in higher education and society, and selected sources of statistics relevant to the humanities.


Planned Project Outcomes:
On the basis of the above-described starter set, students in the Making the Humanities Public project group will aim to do the following:

  • Winter Quarter:
    Collaboratively study the anthology of articles (guided by the topic models and the handbook on the humanities), and by the end of the quarter prepare a "Presidential briefing report" offering an analysis of today's public perception of the humanities and recommendations for advocacy. (We will ask students to pretend they are preparing the briefing report for someone like President Obama--i.e., an expanded version of the kind of briefing document that U.S. presidents receive on their desk in the morning.)

 

  • Spring Quarter:
    Collaboratively create a small set of humanities advocacy projects (two or three) that follow through on some of the recommendations in the previous quarter's "briefing report" (as if the President were to put together a task group to create prototype campaigns for the humanities). For example, one project might make use of traditional and recent forms of public advocacy or journalism--e.g., creating a set of "press releases," "letters to the editor," "op-eds," "podcasts," "videos," "social media campaigns," etc.--that train students in best practices of public relations and communications. Another project might use born-digital, new-media formats--e.g., creating interactive infographics, "storymaps," "timelines," blogs, etc.--that train students in todays' newer methods of public communication.

 

Dissemination:
The CRG's outcomes--briefing report and projects--will be published on the 4Humanities.org site and publicized through 4Humanities press releases, posts, and social media (its Facebook, Twitter accounts). In addition, the project group's outcomes can be presented as extensions of the English Department's annual Arnhold research showcase and Transcriptions SyncDH research slams at the end of the academic year.

Workload, Mentoring, and Reward Structure of the CRG:
Participating students will be expected to meet together every other week or so with the project supervisors during each quarter in both Winter and Spring 2017.  They will be mentored through the mechanism of the Arnhold CRGs: supervision by the graduate-student Arnhold Collaborative Research Adviser under the overall guidance of a faculty member. Jamal Russell will be the graduate student meeting with the students, and Alan Liu will also attend many of the meetings, especially ones at the beginning and end of each quarter where students receive orientation on methods or showcase their results.) Students will be rewarded with a $500 stipend. They will also be designated as "Arnhold Collaborative Research Fellows," which they may wish to add to their c.v.s 

 


This page originally posted December 18, 2016.

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