Does our current education system tend to produce or prevent Frankensteins? This question has been of central importance to our “Reading with Scientists” class over the past three weeks, and as we close our engagement with Mary Shelley’s novel, I’d like to reflect on some of our key discussions. In the first volume of Frankenstein, […]
The version of Frankenstein central to the “Reading with Scientists” syllabus is “Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds” (MIT Press, 2017). Footnotes by multiple authors, some connecting passages to current scientific issues, others filling in literary or historical context, and still others posing difficult ethical questions or providing explicit moral counsel, are […]
We have reached the heart of Frankenstein. This week in “Reading with Scientists,” we paired Shelley’s novel with selections on the genome-editing technology known as CRISPR. Think of it as a tool for DNA customization; CRISPR allows scientists to add or delete certain genetic characteristics, essentially giving us the power to design living organisms to […]
How would you characterize the current relationship between literature and science at UCSB? This question kicked off our first day of “Reading with Scientists: How to Export Literature.” Groups of students came up to the board and mapped out where they see the disciplines converging and diverging; their collective notes opened a number of doors […]
To celebrate the first day of “Reading with Scientists: How to Export Literature,” I’d like to share our syllabus (attached below) and briefly describe the thought process behind it. The purpose of the course is to imagine ways that we might teach literature in non-literary settings, like science classrooms. Our two sessions each week will […]
Between dense methodological and theoretical work, the wonderful news reaches me that the writer T. A. Barron just donated to UCSB to establish leadership in the environmental humanities. This is more than great news; it could be the beginning of a larger story of success. My past and present theoretical work leads me to the […]
As I prepare to bring humanities advocacy into the classroom this year, I want to reflect on some initial guiding principles. I intend this list to be malleable – I hope it will grow and change as I move through the teaching process. Let’s start with a definition. What is “humanities advocacy”? For me, the […]
The act of interpreting a topic (of a topic model) requires any reader to make sense of a list of words. However, this ability “to make sense” – to find coherence, patterns, or similarities in a list of words, as suggested by many of the critics listed in the WE1S Interpreting Topic Models page – seems […]
This summer, the Latin America team completed a variety of interesting tasks to create a foundational corpus of Mexico, Central America, and South America. We sought to gather public discourse about the humanities through the collection of online news articles. Due to the limited number of Latin American news outlets published in English, this region […]
The What Every 1 Says (WE1S) project aims to visualize public discourse on the humanities across many different states, countries, and regions. Although the majority of our corpus comes from major media conglomerates, we hope to gather as much data as possible from other kinds of sources – especially publications from developing nations. A Latin […]
