Sample Topic Models from Summer Research Camp 2018

During the WE1S Summer Research Camp in 2018, teams of research assistants assigned to study media sources from different areas of the world produced topic models to help them understand particular collections of materials and to help guide the project’s evolving strategy for defining its corpus and gathering sources related to public discourse on the humanities. Below are some of the topic models (visualized in dfr-browser) that the research teams found interesting.

  • U.S. and Canada Team:
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in major U.S. newspapers during 2017 (Washington Post, LA Times, NY Times, Chicago Daily Herald) – 1725 text files included (with some 2016 and 2018 articles included because of the nature of the data sets)
      • Comment: “Many of these topics show the trend of reporting on humanities in relation to specific University campuses in the cities in which newspapers are published; also some discussion of the humanities and STEM.”
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” U.S., 2017 (50 topics, 25 newspapers, 536 articles).
    • topic model of articles mentioning “liberal arts” US, 2017 (50 topics, 29 newspapers, 11899 articles).
  • United Kingdom Team:
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts” in National UK papers, 2017:.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in National UK papers, 2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in Scottish papers, 2000-2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in British papers that endorsed the Conservative Party, 2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in British papers that endorsed the Labour Party, 2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in The Guardian, 2012-2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts”in The Guardian, 2012-2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in Welsh papers, 2000-2017
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in Northern Ireland papers, 2000-2017
  • Europe Team:
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in European non-Irish sources (Agence France Press English, The Malta Independent, Malta Today, ANSAmed English, Moscow Times), 2004-2018, 50 topics, 336 articles.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “humanities” in Irish sources (The Irish Times, Irish Voice), 2005-2018, 50 topics, 1482 articles.
  • Mexico, South America, and Central America Team:
    • topic model of media Web-scraped from English-language sources in about 15 nations
  • Asia Team:
    • topic model of “small corpus collected using a manual search for “arts education” ina few Asian countries (excluding China) to see what periodicals (outside of the obvious local ones that we had found) would turn up with 5 or more responses. “
  • Africa and Middle East Team: topic model of all the sources the team gathered. (Spreadsheet experiment with topic labeling: green is “infrastructural humanities” and blue is “meaning word humanities”.)
  • Diverse Populations Team:
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts” in the publication Black Enterprise from 1992-2017.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts” in The Argus Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota) that includes topics about Native American tribes, education, and religion. This is for the first 5 years of the paper.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts” in women’s magazines.
    • topic model of articles mentioning “the arts” in diverse populations newspapers and magazines.
      • Comment from team member: “’The arts’ was especially important [to search on] to get results for diverse populations (particularly in women’s magazines and other publications where the humanities were rarely—if ever—discussed!”
  • Broadcast, Internet, and Alternative Politics News Team: