Meeting Outcomes:

(jump to notebook added after meeting at bottom of page)

1. Administrative Issues

• Immediate issues:
• Copyright assignment forms at CSUN and UM?
• Markup/Github workshop rescheduled for Friday January 26th, 12:30 - 3:30 pm.
• Transitioning Samina into role as project manager.
• Other tasks in the pipeline: 
• Alan to write to Advisory Board with plans for year and summer meeting, plans to consult with subsets of the Board
• Setting up consultation with Ryan Cordell and Jonathan Fitzgerald
• Convening the WE1S Text Analysis Hacker group
• Lindsay and Alan to lead RA meeting Thursday January 18th, 10 am Pacific?
• Need to delegate corpus facet evaluation tasks to specific TAs
• Ingest and Manifest/Virtual Workspace Manager Development : aim point is a February milestone for a working ingest workflow.

2. Planning for Upcoming Postdoc Search Process 

• Beginning of selection phase: Feb. 2 ( "For primary consideration, applications should be received by Feb. 2, 2018, when the selection committee begins reading submissions. The positions will remain open until filled. The last date for applications to be received is May 31, 2018").
• Process for evaluation:

 

Each file will receive two “blind” readings (where the readers do not see each other's reports), followed by a third reading by the search committee chair Alan (who will see the two previous reports). The procedure is as follows:

 

1. Readers evaluate files in the online system and add comments according to the evaluation rubric and ranking scale (to be created roughly in accord with the UCSB English Department's “Stage A Consideration” evaluation form (Stage A Consideration.DOC) and with the Office of Equal Opportunity's request for a "rubric")

 

2. In evaluating a file, readers first do an initial screening to eliminate clearly unqualified candidates. Files rated “0” by one reader will be eliminated, except as overruled by the search committee chair [e.g., in cases where a “0” seems to reflect ambiguity about whether an application “fits” the job description].

 

3. By [date TBD] the search committee meets to discuss the files and cut the pool down to approximately 10-12 to interview. This discussion is facilitated by a ranked, ordered list of files based on averaging the scores assigned by readers. The usual procedure during the meeting is to see if there is a natural break in the order roughly 12 files down, and to adjust individual files up or down. Also, there is normally a stage of the discussion when committee members are invited to make arguments for a small number of files that may not have landed above the cut-off threshold but deserve a reconsideration (such files should have received at least one score of  “5” from a reader).

4. Interviews to be scheduled in late Feb-early March by Zoom. (Interviewing questions TBD) 

 

3. Summer Research Camps

 

• Planning Document v. 2 for Summer 2018 Research Camps

 

4. Advisory Board Meeting

 

• Two days
• Budget:
  
  
• When to schedule the meeting? 
• Agenda for meeting (initial ideas): 
  
• We present the project.
• RAs present some of their work: reports, thoughts, etc.
• General critique/discussion with Board
• Breakout groups on specific issues with particular members of Board
• Reconvene for general discussion 

 

Meeting Outcomes

 

1. Administrative issues:

•    IP Agreements will be signed and collected at next RA meeting (1/18/18)
•    Lindsay and Alan will put together agenda for next RA meeting (1/18/18) <--To do: Lindsay & Alan (COMPLETED 1/18/18)
•    Samina will be keeping track of her hours for the next few weeks, for us to get a sense of workload
• Samina will hold off on updating the public website until after the Markdown/Github workshop
• A likely place on the site for Samina to work on to practice Github and Markdown is the Team page. Samina can "pull" that from the Github repo, edit, and then push it back up, then take the "RAW" version from the Github repo and use it to replace the existing Team page on the WordPress site. The first change is to name Samina as "Project Manager"--added by Alan)
•     Scott will be exploring Watson to see if we can use it for the project (keeping in mind that there may be IP issues)

 

2. Workshops

•    Markdown/Github
•  We will be publicizing the workshop again this week and next week <--To do: Alan (COMPLETED 1/12/18)
•  For now we will use Word during the workshop, but keep in mind that it can“auto-correct” and change the code
•  After workshop, Jeremy and Scott will determine if we need to bring in a few Markdown specialists (since it might take longer than anticipated for RAs to “master” these skills)
•    Jeremy will be sending out a WE1S Text Analysis Hacker Group email next week
•  Group members include linguistics and computer science graduate students (and one faculty member)
•  This group will explore the possibility of word vector analysis (word embedding)

 

3. Postdoc Search Process

•    Everyone (4 PIs) has access to submission folders and emails on UCSB server for recruitment
•    Depending on number of submissions, each PI will read a select number of applications and evaluate them
•    All comments will be saved as "private comments" at first (to avoid bias), then everyone will copy them in to the public comment space.
•    All PIs will review finalist applications
•    Alan will re-tweet Postdoc ad next week <--To do: Alan (COMPLETED 1/16/18)
• Samina: in general, a good role for you among others would be to remind me or the other PIs if you see that we have forgotten to do something. In my own case, I'm juggling so many things these days that it's easy to drop the ball (--Alan)
•    Alan will share required rubric for vetting applications to all PIs next week <--To do: Alan (COMPLETED 1/20/18)

 

4. Summer Camp (Alan revised after the meeting "Planning Document for Summer 2018 Research Camps, v. 2")

•    Presentation Day will be changed to an earlier date (originally scheduled for Mon, Aug 6^th)
•    Some students are interested in participating remotely
•  We will allow students who are strongly invested in project to tele-communicate, but would prefer having most students present for the camp
•  Lindsay suggests meeting regularly for the first two weeks, then meeting only once or twice a week for the remainder of the camp
•   Alan will be putting out call for UCSB camp in the next few weeks <--To do: Alan
•   Scott is also putting out a call for the similarly designed CSUN camp in the next few weeks <--To do: Scott
•   Scott will try to recruit some computer scientists for the camp

 

5. Advisory Board Meeting             

•    Before end of week, we will send out invites to board members for the Conference/Symposium <--To do: Alan (COMPLETED 1/15/18)
•  If the number of attendees is low, we might reschedule the Advisory Board symposium for next summer
•  RAs will take on the roles of symposium organizers and presenters
•   We are considering lowering the advisory board honorarium to reallocate funds for summer camp
• final call on this: we are keeping the honorarium the same ($1000) and offering a lower honorarium for those who can only visit for a short period ($400) updated 1/15/18

 

6. Ingest and Manifest/Virtual Workspace Manager Development

•   Jeremy and Scott should have a testable version ready by mid-February <-- To do: Jeremy & Scott
•   Lindsay and Alan will be the “guinea pigs” for the first test-run
•  After the first test, we will decide how to log failures, and if we should resubmit certain batches with too many failures (and how to report error rate)
•   Jeremy has a Unicode “best practices” that will help with error prevention—he will share this with WE1S team
•   Scott has a Jupyter notebook that inserts publications into database
•   RAs can start pulling articles and submitting them into database
•      Next goal: output zip archive with manifest
• o   Writing manifest into MongoDB will save time for RAs

 

7. Miscellaneous:

•     Public website hits
•  Is there a straightforward way with Google Analytics to have a monthly report of website hits?
•      Scott currently uses a WordPress plugin, but he will consider other options for our progress reports
• The Google Analytics website allows you to save a variety of reports as PDF or export the data. We just need to decide what info we want in our monthly report. (COMPLETED 1/13/18)