Research Outputs

The WhatEvery1Says (WE1S) project uses digital humanities methods to study public discourse about the humanities at large data scales. The project concentrates on, but is not limited to, journalistic articles available in digital textual form beginning circa 1981. In the process of its work, WE1S is also developing tools and guidelines to create an open, generalizable, and replicable digital humanities methodology.  (See fuller statement of research goals.)

Research Outputs to Date

Embarking upon our final year of the project (2017-2020), the WE1S corpus has grown to several million articles collected from Lexis Nexis, ProQuest, news websites, social media, and archived television and radio transcripts. Along the way, we have developed a detailed and standardized interpretation protocol, representing one of the first fully theorized methodologies for reading and interpreting topic models in a public discourse context. This helps us move from initial research questions to methodologically rigorous results, which eventually become key findings.

. Additionally, it is producing supporting research that has its own value as output. These include:

Current Primary Research Activities

  • Summer Research Camps – WE1S summer research camps at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and California State University, Northridge (CSUN) enlist student research assistants for five weeks each year in intensive work focused on data collection and analysis, scholarly research on contexts and methods, technical experimentation, and the creation of humanities advocacy resources. In some project years, WE1S recruits students from other institutions for its research camps through co-sponsorship from their colleges or universities.

Other Scholarly Research Activities (Lectures and Papers related to WE1S)

  • Scott Kleinman. “The Challenge of Proprietary Data for Open Research in the Humanities.” Talk at Open Access 2018: Radical Transformations, California State University, Northridge, 23 October 2018.
  • Alan Liu. “Open and Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities–A 35,000-foot Elevation View.” Keynote address. Digital Bridges Symposium (Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry project), University of Iowa and Grinnell College, 10 August 2018.
  • Alan Liu. “Open and Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities–A 10,000 Meter Elevation View.” Keynote address. Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries Convention 2018. University of Helsinki, 7 March 2018.
  • Alan Liu. “WhatEvery1Says About the Humanities.” Talk for panel on “What Crisis?: Mobilizing the Humanities Through Data.” National Humanities Conference, 3 November 2017, Boston.
  • Ashley Champagne, Jeremy Douglass, Scott Kleinman, Alan Liu, Jamal Russell, and Lindsay Thomas. “Open, Shareable, Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities.” Panel on “Open, Shareable, Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities: The Case of the 4Humanities.org ‘WhatEvery1Says’ Project.” Digital Humanities 2017 conference, 11 August 2017, Montreal. (Panel Abstract)
  • Alan Liu. “Open, Shareable, Reproducible Workflows for the Digital Humanities: The Case of the 4Humanities.org ‘WhatEvery1Says’ Project.” Lecture. University of Sussex. 29 March 2017.
  • Alan Liu. “WhatEvery1Says About the Humanities — Digital Humanities Methods for Understanding and Making a Difference in Public Perception of the Humanities.” Lecture. Dartmouth College. 20 September 2016.
  • Alan Liu. “Digital Humanities: Overview and the Example of the 4Humanities.org WhatEvery1Says Project.” Lecture. University of Mannheim. 31 August 2016.
  • Alan Liu. “The 4Humanities WhatEvery1Says Project: Initial Work and Future Plans.” Talk at SyncDH, University of California, Santa Barbara. 27 May 2016.
  • Alan Liu. “The Future of the Humanities / The Future and the Humanities.” Lecture. University of San Francisco. 29 February November 2016.
  • Alan Liu. “WhatEvery1Says About the Humanities.” Lecture. University of Otago, Dunedin. 27 November 2015. (Lecture delivered as part of a series in New Zealand during Fulbright Specialist residency at U. Canterbury, October-November, 2015.)
  • Alan Liu. “The Future of the Humanities / The Future and the Humanities.” Lecture. University of Canterbury. 5 November 2015. (Lecture delivered as part of a series in New Zealand during Fulbright Specialist residency at U. Canterbury, October-November, 2015.)