The purpose of our next meeting will be to: (a) Planning for spring and summer work -- Pull together everything we've done into a work plan for finalizing files in our corpus, topic modeling them, putting them in a topic model interface, with storage and querying support in MongoDB. (b) Plan for analysis work, dissemination, and implementation grant
Alan's third Academic Senate grant proposal: (excerpts from draft) --
"This third request for an Academic Senate research grant (which I anticipate will be the last) is focused on bringing "WhatEvery1Says" forward to the point where it can disseminate research results based on its existing corpus of collected materials; submit a collaborative proposal for the major annual refereed conference in the digital humanities field; and submit a proposal for an extramural NEH digital-humanities "implementation grant" (and possibly additional proposals to such agencies as the ACLS]. In other words, this proposal is for funding to allow the project to "graduate" to a national stage of research and development supported by other sources.... Plans for 2016-17 are chiefly to:"
Finalize the project's current corpus of public documents, and create publicly-viewable metadata for that corpus.
Disseminate our topic models and analyses in a public-facing site designed to allow for interactive exploration of the topics, their interrelationships, and sources.
Submit an extramural grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities (Office of Digital Humanities) to scale up coverage of source publications and nations. In particular, we are exploring the possibility of a Digital Humanities Implementation Grant (between $100,000 and $350,000). We have discussed "WhatEvery1Says" in a preliminary way with a grant officer at the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, who has informally indicated the agency's interest. If we can bring "WhatEvery1Says" forward to the stage where it is feasible to apply for the Implementation Grant, we may especially link our proposal to the NEH's new initiative titled "The Common Good: The Humanities in the Public Square." Note: for the purposes of the NEH Digital Humanities Implementation Grant, work on "WhatEvery1Says" conducted to date on UCSB Academic Senate grants counts as the prerequisite "start up" phase. (Additionally, we may submit extramural proposals for grants related to the digital humanities from the American Council of Learned Societies--e.g., for the ACLS Digital Extension grants or ACLS Digital Innovation grants.)
Submit a collaborative paper and panel proposal for Digital Humanities 2017.
Submit a collaborative article for DHCommons Journal, which publishes peer-reviewed articles on in-progress digital-humanities projects.
Evolve further a virtualized workstation environment for our topic modeling work and also finalize our Manifest Schema provenance system and its backend MongoDB platform.
The following is an estimated breakdown of hours by task (budget request of $9,950):
Assist in finalizing the "WhatEvery1Says" document corpus, and preparing metadata for the corpus: 140 RA hours
Assist in topic modeling the final corpus and analyzing the topic models (through a series of iterative topic models and interpretation steps): 140 RA hours
Assist in preparing a grant proposal for the National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Implementation Grant (and possibly also other grants from the NEH or ACLS): 80 RA hour
Assist in preparing submission of papers and of a panel proposal for Digital Humanities 2017 and also of an article for DHCommons Journal: 20 RA hours. (Note: in addition to assisting with preparing submission materials and conducting the submission process, graduate student RAs may electively be co-authors of papers depending on the relation of their project research to the specific paper, their role in co-writing the paper, etc. I have good results in past grant-driven projects incubating graduate-student co-authored publications and hope to reproduce that as a result of "WhatEvery1Says.")
Assist in technical work on the project's digital front-end and back-end: 140 RA hours (MAT students if available). Specific tasks include:
creating a public-facing interactive site for exploring topic models (based on adapting and customizing existing systems for this purpose such as DFR-Browser).
finalizing virtualized/containerized workstation environments for the project's topic modeling and analysis work.
finalizing the Manifest Schema system of provenance forms
finalizing the project's MongoDB database to support querying/dynamic generation of metadata about the project's corpus and topic models; and also querying/dynamic generation of provenance metadata.
Some possibilities for meeting date to discuss the above strategy and work plan (and to coordinate work at CSUN, U. Miami, and McGill):
Friday, April 15 (at 2:30)
Friday, April 22 (at 2:30)
Focus for Today's Meeting: Progress on Implementing Topic Modeling Systems/Interfaces
Setting up a virtual/container environment for our topic modeling and topic model interface work: --To Do: set up specs list on PBWorks site; Jamal to be point person in adding and implementing on the machine
Jeremy: "Hi Alan -- I've looked briefly at this, and I think this should be quite do-able with any of these approaches:
A hosted or local docker
A straight virtualbox machine
Possibly a hosted docker which can also be downloaded to a local virtualbox.
I'm meeting with Jamal after our afternoon meeting -- if I can get details on the installations he has been working with and his use cases, we should be able to get something up and running fairly quickly."