Takeaway ideas from Board meeting (to be discussed sometime in Sept. at a follow-up project management group meeting)

• (Kelly): Stakeholders - English, etc
• (Two-way design of interpretation and outputs with stakeholder groups, eg, state Humanities Councils
• (Ben): Add facets of corpus for “art history,” etc
• (Greg): What are use cases for our system, and reverse sustainability strategy from there
• (Catherine): don’t try to represent all diverse groups. Alan: do case studies where we get materials and talk to groups
• (Ted): topic model, and then human readers who interpret and narrate
• (Ryan Cordell): classifiers for supervised prediction of articles on the humanities
• (Ted): metadata and classifiers for sections of the newspaper
• Pro quest and Gale backends (Peter Leonard Yale)
• Stakeholder groups surveys:
• Humanities councils
• Advocacy groups
• Deans and other stakeholders at universities
• Humanities centers
• Policy makers
• TV news (scrapers from Ben)
• Internet Archive
• Chunk size: shorter = more coherent but less interesting
• Mallet inference model
• Student stakeholders
• Social media
• Reddit
• University web sites
• Course catalog descriptions
• Toolkits
• Humanities harvest days
• 19th century resources: leverage it for research and outputs
• Surprises
• Find narratives
• African American Intellectual History Society
• Humanities map, past and future
• Value terms for humanities and translations of them: build “principles”
• Outputs for scholars
• Priority audiences for our toolkits
• Personas
• Build narratives for Humanities Indicators
• Skills that people are passionate about
• Different kinds of stories and evidence about the humanities
• Creative stories around Humanities Indicators

1. WE1S Technical Platform and Collection Work

• Status Workspace Manager 
• LexisNexis WSK certification 
• Status of the notebook system
• Updating to new version of Mallet in the system
• Notebooks for Sihwa's visualization and pyLDAvis 
• Status of WMS 
• Status of collection work (from summer and ongoing)
• How are we holding and organizing data (and collection lists) in the interim until WMS is ready?
• How will we be queuing and running new collection jobs?
• How are we holding, organizing, and annotating topic models? 
• Ensuring that we harvest summer 2018 work:
• Reviewing lab notebooks, logs, reports, and other outputs; and publishing them on the public website
• manifests for such material? 
• can we flow materials from WMS to the web site? 
• Packaging summer 2018 work up in a form that can inform academic year work and then be passed on to summer camp 2019. (Create summary report with links and highlights?)
• appoint team for this in fall? 
• Evolving and using the WE1S Bibliography 
• appoint RAs to work on this in fall as editorial liaisons with Naz for the bibliography? 
• Enable website visitor stats (to prepare for future reports to the Mellon)
• Interim sustainability solutions
• backups of our technical platform
• backups and repo of the WordPress site 
• "secrets" vault to pass on vital logins, etc.? 
• Purchasing and building the WE1S word-embedding machine 

2. Academic Year 2018-2019 Workplan

• RA recruitment
• UCSB --calls for RAs to go out soon (need to balance between retaining veterans and on-boarding at least some new folks)
• Budget for RAS: 
• During 2017-18 (academic year & summer), we spent  ~$30,000 on RA salaries at UCSB out of an allocated budget (after the budget modification request to the Mellon) of $32,320:
• academic year RA salaries for about nine RAs : $9,064 (allocated amount: $10,000)
• summer camp 2018 salaries:  $20,670 (allocated amount: $22,320)
• (there are likely lagging salaries that will use up some of the surplus of ~$2,000) 
• The 2018-19 allocation for RAs at UCSB is as follows. (Note: this does not include the project manager funding, which is a separate budget line in project years 2 and 3)
• academic year: $14,940
• This amount represents 964 hours of work. Realistically, there are about 24-25 weeks of work during the academic year, meaning that there are a total of about 40 hours work per week. Last year, RAs averaged something like 5 hrs per week. So, figuring on that basis, we can afford about the same number of 9 RAs during the academic year at UCSB. (That is a conservative estimate, given RA working hours last year, so the figure could be stretched up to 11 or so. We can throttle hours late in the year if needed to keep under budget. )
• summer camp 2019: $22,320 
• UM
• Budget for RAs:
• We've spent $13,114.56 on RA salaries total so far at UM out of an allocated $14,209 (note $10,050 of this has yet to be billed to UCSB, this includes the project manager stipend)
• We have $1,094.44 left (probably want to put this toward PM position for this year, since it came in a bit higher than we originally budgeted because of an increase in the TA stipend)
• The 2018-19 allocation for RAs at UM is:
• Project manager: ~$22,000-$23,000 (I don't yet have the official figure) 
• Hourly RAs: $13,500 
• This figure represents 675 hours of work. If we say there are about 25 weeks in the academic year, that's 27 hours/week. Last year, hourly RAs averaged from 2-5 hours/week. We had budgeted for 3 hourly RAs/semester at UM, which we can easily afford (we could think about hiring more hourly RAs in the spring at UM if we wanted). However, we won't be hiring any hourly RAs at UM this semester because Lindsay is on leave. Should we set aside some of the money that we would have used to pay hourly RAs this semester to pay for 1-2 UM grad students to come out to UCSB for next summer's research camp?
• Alan's comment: this is an intriguing idea. I wonder if  it would require a budget modification request to the Mellon because we'd need to move funding from the salaries line to the travel line. However, for the Mellon version of our budget, the UM subgrant is only a single line (not broken out for separate purposes as in the case of the UCSB budget. I can ask the Mellon if we need to do a rebudgeting request.)
• CSUN 
• Workplan
• Orientation meeting in October to organize teams for the year
• Collection and topic modeling work teams: continuation of the "AM team" concept
• Additional research and reporting work teams: continuation of the "PM team" concept (plus teams on Linguistics and Word Embedding)
• Special task teams as needed--e.g.,
• team to harvest the summer work
• team to generate manifests retroactively for existing collection once the WMS is ready?
• team to integrate bibliographies in research reports 
• team to work on IRB issues 
• team to work on "random corpus" 
• teams to work on subcorpora. One subcorpus is Spanish-language media. Here was the description of other possible subcorpora in the WE1S Mellon proposal:
• Historical newspaper coverage of the humanities from earlier in the 20th century (gathered through ProQuest Historical Newspapers; the Library of Congress's Chronicling America resource; and, in some cases, through the archives and API's of individual newspapers);
• Government and political documents (gathered through resources such as Congress.gov, Whitehouse.gov, U. S. Government Publishing Office, and the archives of individual states, with data gathering assisted by API's from the Sunlight Foundation)15;
• Reports and publications by scholarly and professional associations as well as grant agencies and foundations16;
• Public documents of higher-education institutions that mention the humanities (e.g., so called university "viewbooks"; mission statements of humanities centers; and speeches by campus presidents and deans);
• Scholarly research articles discussing the humanities (collected from JSTOR). A particularly rich avenue of research will be to use the recently introduced JSTOR Labs Text Analyzer service to discover research articles relevant to sample materials from the WE1S corpus. (Because the Text Analyzer builds on JSTOR Lab's own usage of topic modeling, there may also be ways that WE1S can use Text Analyzer to corroborate or extend WE1S analyses of topic models.) 
• team to work on piping datasets and visualizations from  
• Teams to meet sometimes independently with the project managers without the PIs,
• All-hands meetings with the PIs & postdocs every 2-3 weeks
• Periodic special-purpose meetings--e.g.,
• Group discussion of the corpus and collection work
• Group discussion of topic modeling interpretation process Harbor into the public website interface
• Group discussion of implementing Advisory Board recommendation of liaising with stakeholder groups
• Meeting to discuss teaching (WE1S Curriculum Lab) 
• Meeting of PIs and postdocs with Greg Janee to do forward planning on sustainability and dissemination issues: WE1S repository organization and lifecyle
• Workshop on word-embedding
• Meeting to discuss experimental methods (WE1S Interpretation lab)
• combined use of topic modeling and word-embedding
• "Wikification"
• time-series topic modeling
• multilingual topic modeling 
• Creation of a master taskboard/timeline for the year (in Ryver?) 
• "Triage" of the project at end of project year two as promised in the Mellon proposal 
• Alan to take the lead in writing first progress report for the Mellon due in December 2018 (from Mellon award letter: "We shall expect to receive interim narrative and financial reports on or before December 31st of2018 and 2019, reporting on activities through the preceding September 30th.")
• Project PIs should review the promised timeline for year 1 in the Mellon proposal
• Alan (with project managers' assistance will in fall begin collecting information and materials for the report
• Postdoc renewal process.
• Travel during 2018-19?
• PIs to travel to UM and CSUN?
• Planning for Summer Research Camp 2019 
• Role of the project managers during the academic year (?):
• Run some meetings with the RA teams
• Oversee the WE1S research blog and other publishing and dissemination tasks
• At UCSB: take over from Alan Kronos tasks 

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5.

Planning for Future Meetings