Area of Focus Reports

The WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) project uses digital humanities methods to study public discourse about the humanities. The WE1S project team assembled an English-language primary corpus of articles and other material from publications (including newspapers, magazines, and television and radio transcripts) that is studied using text-analysis methods.

Corpus scoping work identified publications and databases for the primary WE1S corpus. Research assistants were assigned to cover one or several “areas of focus” in order to ensure that WE1S achieved some measure of representativeness in its main corpus. Areas of focus, for example, include global nations and regions, alternative/indie sources, and news sources targeted toward various racial, ethnic, and gender groups.

As the project proceeded, research assistants produced reports on their areas of focus that raised thought-provoking questions and reflections about representativeness, canonicity, source availability, and the source collection process. These reports appear below.