Advisory Board Meeting (Aug. 2, 2019)

Meeting Purpose

The WE1S project’s meeting via remote conferencing with its Advisory Board on August 2, 2019, is the capstone event for its second annual summer research camp, which ran for five weeks beginning July 1 2019). A Briefing Report sent in advance to the Board provides background on project work in academic year 2018-2019 and summer 2019. During the meeting on August 2nd, the 36 particpants in the summer research camp will give lightning presentations and then seek guidance from the Board in a plenary consultation session on strategic questions facing the project.


Participants

WE1S Board Members

WE1S Project Team

  • Project leadership team (PIs, project managers, postdoctoral scholars, other faculty and staff)
  • Summer Research Camp 2019 research assistants (UCSB) (CSUN)

Schedule

 

Friday, August 2, 2019

11am – noon (Pacific)
Welcome to the Advisory Board members
Lightning presentations from WE1S summer research camp teams

Noon – 1pm

Plenary consultation session with the Board

Questions for the Board:

(1) We are finding it a challenge to find good ways to identify and analyze in our collections/models (including those based on ProQuest Ethnic NewsWatch and GenderWatch sources) how underrepresented and first-generation groups are discussed in the media in relation to the humanities. How can we enhance our research collections or methods to address this better, or to ascertain whether the conversation about such groups in relation specifically to the humanities is actually occurring in meaningful ways in public media at all?

(2) As described above, one experimental version of our core topic model has been “wikified” so that named entities are disambiguated through automated reference to Wikipedia articles and also associated with geolocation and chronological data. We are aware, of course, of well-known criticisms of Wikipedia for failing to provide “an equal, wide survey” of people and the world (to borrow the subtitle of one of John Barrell’s books: English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide Survey). More generally, we are also aware that our underlying collection(s) of media materials is not “an equal, wide survey.” What is the best way for WE1S to address the issues of omission, underrepresentation, and unbalance in studying “public” discourse when we release findings next year to the public and also to the scholarly community?

(3) How might WE1S integrate its research into public discourse on the humanities with statistical research into the state of the humanities of the sort gathered by Humanities Indicators?

(4) What are the best kinds of advocacy outputs that WE1S, using its research, can suggest (or prototype) for advocating the humanities in education and society?

1 – 2:30 pm
Catered Lunch in DAHC for UCSB and CSUN summer research camp participants
2:30 – 4 pm

WE1S participants’ strategy meeting

  • Planning for final project year
  • “Triage” session

(See WE1S project’s PBworks agenda page for this meeting)