Meeting (2018-10-09) -- Orientation for Academic Year 2018-2019

1. Introductions

• Project PIs and Co-PIs
•  Alan Liu (UCSB)
• Jeremy Douglas (UCSB)
• Scott Kleinman (CSUN)
• Lindsay Thomas (U. Miami)
• Other Project Faculty
• Mauro Carassai (CSUN)
• Colleen Tripp (CSUN)
• Project postdocs (UCSB)
• Dan Baciu (director, WE1S Intrerpretation Lab)
• Abigail Droge (director, WE1S Curriculum Lab)
• Project managers
• Giorgina Paiella (UCSB)
• Tarika Sankar (U. Miami)
• UCSB RAs
• Continuing with the project
• Sandra Auderset (Linguistics)
• Rebecca Baker (English)
• Sean Gilleran (History)
• Naz Keynejad (Comparative Lit.)
• Ryan Leach (English)
• Fabian Offert (MAT)
• Sihwa Park (MAT)
• Teddy Roland (English)
• Jamal Russell (English)
• Tyler Shoemaker (English)
• Chloe Willis (Linguistics)
• New to project
• Su Burtner (Geography)
• Cindy Kang (MAT)
• Aleah Kiley (Film & Media Studies)
• Isaac Mackey (Computer Science)
• Leila Stegemoeller (English) 
• Undergraduates (taking independent studies courses in conjunction with WE1S) 
• Jessica Gang (pre-English) 
• Avery Martin (English) 
• CSUN RAs
• Joyce Brummet (English)
• Ray Steding (English)
• Katie Wolf (English) 
• U. Miami RAs
• [TBD] 

 

2. Orientation

RAs who are new to WE1S are asked to familiarize themselves (on paid time, up to three paid hours) with these orientation materials, including materials on the project's mission and context, and materials on the project's technical methods.

 

• Overview by WE1S PI & co-PIs (Alan, Lindsay, Jeremy, Scott)  
• Current status of project -- (Overview presentation slides)
• Collection work
• Workspace Management System
• Sample topic models from Summer Research Camp 2018 
• Manifest Schema & Workflow Management System (WMS)
• Plans for Fall 2018: Focusing and completing an end-to-end process of collection, topic modeling, and interpretation.
• General rhythm of work this academic year:
• All-hands meetings and workshops (tentative)
• Tue. Oct. 16th, 9-11 am -- Workshop on process for queuing collection jobs, and creating a topic model using the Workspace Manager System (Jupyter notebooks). This will introduce the new RAs to the process, and update the veterans about how we are doing this now. (Step-by-step Guide to Using the WE1S workspace Jupyter notebook system)
• Tue. Oct. 23rd, 9-11 am -- Meeting focused on assessing where we are with collection work: status of the U.S. corpus, "representativeness" issues, etc.
• Tue. Nov. 6, 9-11 am -- First end-to-end topic modeling exercise. 
• Team-specific meetings 
• Role of the project managers (Giorgina and Tarika) 
• Logistics:
• Reporting hours in Kronos
• Copyright assignation form 
• Ryver and team communications (link to WE1S project Team 2018-2019) 

 

3. Task-teams

During Fall 2018, all teams will focus on U.S. sources unless otherwise noted. We will begin expanding outward globally again later in the year. The first task of each team will be to meet and discuss goals and plans for the fall quarter. (Project team folders in Google Drive)

 

• (1) Primary Corpus Collection & Analysis Team -- (Led by: Lindsay Thomas, with the other PIs; Members: Tyler, Leila, Rebecca, Jamal, Ryan, Sean)
• “Humanities” Keyword Sub-Team -- (Led by: TBD; Members: TBD) Analyzes materials collected by searching for the word "humanities"

• Review LexisNexis data from the summer; determine what else we need to collect and collect it

• Other Keywords Sub-Team -- (Led by: TBD; Members: TBD)  Analyzes materials collected through experiments with other search terms/phrases

• Determine what other keywords we should collect and from what sources, collect this data

• Small-scale experiments with this data to compare to “humanities” data

• Metadata Sub-Team -- (Led by: Lindsay Thomas) 

• Planning Document for Team Goals and Tasks   

 

• (2) Students and the Humanities Team (Led by Abigail Droge; Members: Jessica, Avery, Leila, Rebecca, Aleah, Tyler)

 

• Analyzes materials collected to help understand students' relation to, and perception of, the humanities. One special focus of this team will be to try to collect and study materials related to first-generation-to-college students. (Note: This team is associated with the WE1S Curriculum Lab led by Abigail. The Curriculum lab will assist with IRB-related research. Also, If the linguistics sub-team consisting of Chloe Willis and Sandra Auderset proceeds, it could be coordinated with the "Students and the Humanities Team.")

• Planning Document for Team Goals and Tasks  

 

• (3) "Gender, Ethnic, and Racial Diversity and Interests" Team (Led by Giorgina Paiella; Members: Jamal, Aleah, Su) 
• Analyzes materials collected to help understand the relation of racial, ethnic, and gender groups to the humanities. Note: this team will liaise as needed with other teams, including team #1, #2, and #3.

• Focus during fall on one or two groups 

• Collection of materials from college websites to supplement collection of journalistic media materials 

• Planning Document for Team Goals and Tasks  

 

• (4) Interpretation Lab Team (Led by Dan Baciu; Members: Su, Isaac, Ryan, Sean, Cindy, Sihwa) 
• Development of Interpretation Protocol for topic modeling; methods of exploration and validation to support the protocol (plus experimentation with related other methods such as topic modeling over time, structured data extraction and Wikification)
• Slides for recent Interpretation Lab meeting 
• Word Embedding Sub-Team (Fabian offert, Teddy Roland, Isaac, Su, Ryan)

• Data Visualization Sub-Team (Sihwa Park, Cindy Kang) 

• "Random" Corpus Sub-Team (Led by Lindsay Thomas; Members: U. Miami RAs, Ray) 

• Determine how to collect random corpus; collect it; small-scale experiments

 

• (5) Team to Harvest and Report on Summer 2018 work (and notes from the Advisory Board meeting) --  (Led by TBD; Members: )  

 

 

4. Organization of Task Teams

• Who is interested in which team? (RAs can be on more than one team)
• Breakout sessions for teams to self-organize.