Collaboration Tools: WE1S participants also collaborate through the Ryver team communications platform, a PBworks site, and the project Google team drive. For remote conferencing, WE1S uses Zoom (instructions).

Orientation week (June 29-July 2)

• Monday (Orientation Day 1)
  • AM Session (10am-1pm)
    • Introductions
    • Alan:
      • Summer camp overview
      • Review of research materials and research workflow (collections, models, visualizations, counting notebooks, Interpretation Protocol, reporting documentation, cards system)
      • Instructions on tracking workflow on Taskboards.
    • Adjustment of teams & members
  • PM Session (2-4pm)
    • Rebecca & Ashley:
      • Zoom protocols (how we will use Zoom in all-hands, multi-meeting, and /or breakout room formats)
      • Best practices to prevent “Zoom fatigue” (See “Summer Camp Zoom Fatigue Suggestions”)
    • Jeremy: SNACK (Summer Not-Altogether Camp) project
    • Multi-meeting or Breakout sessions: (Team Zoom meeting addresses)
      • Teams review their work to date (and prepare to report a summary the next morning)
        • When reviewing work, please go this the Document Deposit Register spreadsheet and fill in where possible the columns labeled in blue .
      • X-Team members meet for planning (coordinated by Rebecca, with the consultation of PIs as needed)
• Tuesday (Orientation Day 2)
  • AM
    • Teams give briefing reports on completed and ongoing research to date.
    • Abigail: Cards and Roadmapping Overview
      • “Building a Research-to-Action Roadmap” worksheet
        • Note: Each team has a uniquely-named copy of this worksheet in their working folder–e.g., WE1S Team Drive > _Team Working Space> Team 3 > _Roadmap Planning > “Team 3 – Building a Reserch-to-Action Roadmap Worksheet”
    • Alan: Review of early 4Humanities.org discussions of “framing” the humanities and of humanities advocacy (PowerPoint slides from 2014 talk) (Google Slides version)
      • Recommended materials:
        • The Frameworks Institute, “Beginner’s Guide to Strategic Frame Analysis” (2009) (slides requiring Flash).
        • A. Liu, “Creating a Humanities Advocacy media Plan” (2011) (Prezi presentation) (see only first few slides).
    • Discussion
  • PM
    • Multi-meeting or Breakout sessions:
      • Teams begin work on their “Building a Research-to-Action Roadmap” worksheet
        • Note: Each team has a uniquely-named copy of this worksheet in their working folder–e.g., WE1S Team Drive > _Team Working Space> Team 3 > _Roadmap Planning > “Team 3 – Building a Reserch-to-Action Roadmap Worksheet”
      • X-Team members meet with project management group (PIs, postdocs, or project managers as appropriate) for planning.
• Wednesday (Orientation Day 3)
  • AM
    • All-hands discussion of teams’ “Building a Research-to-Action Roadmap” worksheets so far.
    • Breakout sessions: Teams continue work on their “Building a Research-to-Action Roadmap” worksheet
  • PM
    • Teams continue working on the roadmap worksheet.
• Thursday (Orientation Day 4)
  • AM
    • Brief all-hands session
    • Teams continue working on the roadmap worksheet.
  • PM
    • 2:00 pm: Teams report to all-hands on their Research-to-Action Roadmap worksheets
    • 3:00 pm: For anyone interested: Lindsay will give an orientation to the counting notebooks (and related notebooks) in the all-hands Zoom meeting.
    • 3:00 pm: Other teams continue working:
      • Teams and individuals post initial tasks on the project TaskBoards.

Regular Weekly Schedule during the Camp

As described above:

During morning (“AM”) sessions, most teams will focus on research activities related to ongoing interpretation of WE1S data (“collections”) and models (topic models)—culminating, for example, in the writing of Key Finding cards, Collection & Model cards, Key Methods cards, topic model dictionaries, etc. Then in afternoon (“PM”) sessions, many teams will segue from their research to related “research-to-action” work—e.g., producing Call-to-Action and Call-to-Communication recommendations and writing them up in WE1S’s documentation “cards” system. (Teams have the flexibility to set their own daily tasks in ways that vary from the above general plan. The main idea is that teams will be more productive and fresher in their work if they transition from AM to PM each day between different, related tasks.)

Note: For the benefit of some participants who are on the other side of the world or who occasionally need to work asynchronously, parts of all-hands Zoom meetings will be recorded for private project use.

• AM: 10am – 1pm
• PM: 2pm – 4pm
• Thursday progress update meetings (“accountability Thursdays”)
  • All-hands meetings at the beginning of the PM sessions on the Thursdays of each week for project participants to brief everyone on their progress during the week. Because we are putting the emphasis on making progress and actually finishing things this summer, we are informally calling these meetings “accountability Thursdays.”

Summer Capstone Event (July 31)

• Advance work for the event during the last week of July
  • Teams prepare the script and materials for a lightning talk on a selected finding or output chosen for impact and to address one of WE1S’s possible audiences.
• Friday, July 31
  • Recording of lightning talks.
  • Virtual happy hour to close the camp.

About WE1S Mission and Context

WE1S Prospectus — This prospectus is a shortened distillation of the original grant proposal submitted by WE1S to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

About WE1S Technical Methods

The main digital humanities method used by WE1S to understand pubic discourse on the humanities is “topic modeling” — an important computational “machine learning” approach shared with other areas in the social sciences and the sciences. WE1S is also experimenting with other text analysis methods that extend, complement, or provide alternatives to topic modeling, including “word embedding” (or “word vectors”).

WE1S is implementing the above methods by developing a workflow system (Workspace and Manager) that is innovative as a paradigm for open, reproducible research in the digital humanities but that borrows for its nuts-and-bolts from common basic methods in the digital sciences, social sciences, and humanities. These nuts and bolts include the use of Markdown, scripting languages, serialization protocols (such as JSON), Jupyter “data science” notebooks, “containerization” solutions such as Docker, and versioning repository systems such as Github.

It is not important that all WE1S participants be hands-on with the project’s core technical or nuts-and-bolts methods. But for basic literacy about what is involved as participants analyze the results of topic modeling or listen to demos and presentations about the project’s technical platform, some preliminary reading is useful. Participants who are new to WE1S are asked to read (or, in the case of some web sites, browse) the following materials to gain orientation:

Topic Modeling

• (3) David M. Blei, “Probabilistic Topic Models” (2013)  — (read only to end of p. 79, before the math begins)
• (4) Edwin Chen, “Introduction to Latent Dirichlet Allocation” (2011)
• (5)Ted Underwood, “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough” (2012)
• (6) Andrew Goldstone’s interface for exploring topic models. The Signs model has some extra, later-developed features. Especially helpful in learning how to work with these models is the guide page on “Interpreting the topic model of Signs“
  • topic models of 100 years of literary criticism journals
  • topic models of 40 years of the Signs journal of “Women in Culture and Society”

• (7) John Mohr and Petko Bogdanov, “Topic Models: What They Are and Why They Matter” (2013) . This article is paywalled. UCSB students have free access through campus network or from off-campus through the UCSB VPN or Library Proxy server. CSUN students can access the article here through the campus network or VPN. There is also an open-access manuscript version.

WE1S Platform for Interpretation of Topic Models

• (8) Topic Model Observatory Guide [requires project participant password] — FAQ guide to the visualization interfaces that WE1S uses to interpret topic models
• (9) Interpretation Protocol — a set of Qualtrics surveys that guide and record various steps of interpretation (flowchart of planned survey modules)