1. Review budget, spending, personnel, and grant administration issues  

• Budget & spending
• UCSB
• Current spending projections
• Spending of interest earned on the grant 
• U. Miami (can we spend interest at U.M.?)
• CSUN 
• Course buyouts 
• Course buyout forms at UCSB for Alan & Jeremy
• Pending actions to process course buyouts at CSUN & UM? 
• Personnel
• Postdoc renewal process
1. In March (about 3 months before end of contract on June 30th), Alan to do the evaluation forms for our postdocs and initiate the renewal process.
• (If it looks like a postdoc will be leaving, then we then do a preview of the search request with AP and OEO; for initiation for a search for a postdoc starting Sept. 1.)
• Will need to work with OIS on any postdoc visa issues
2. In March-April, we also prepare the paperwork on the lecturer renewals. Once the postdoc renewals are approved, then we submit the request for the lecturer appointments
• Our postdocs to submit course plans as usual on spec in Dec.
3. Once the lecturer appointments are approved, then we start the request for salary modification on the postdocs.
4. Note: we have to remember that since the yearly appointment of the postdocs is July 1 to June 30, they will not be with us for the final summer research camp in year 3 
• Project managers
• Calls for next year
• Note that the appointments of our postdocs is July 1 to June 30 each year, meaning they won't be with us for the final summer research camp in project year 3 (alas). 
• RAs
• UCSB, U. Miami, CSUN 
• Encourage writing of research posts during academic year? 
• Equipment
• Wireless audio system for DAHC?
• Conferencing system used in Chancellor's conference room at UCSB 
• Consult with Kerr Hall at UCSB? 
• Log of items for second Mellon progress report  

2. Consult on project roadmap for rest of academic year 2018-2019

1. Ongoing tasks with end-of-academic year deadlines
1. Standing teams (collection, interpretation, and methods development work)
1. Primary Corpus Collection & Analysis Team (led by Lindsay Thomas)
2. Students and the Humanities Team (led by Abigail Droge)
3. Diverse Populations Team (led by Giorgina Paiella)
4. Interpretation Lab Team (led by Dan Baciu)
1. Interpretation Protocol development
2. Data Visualization 
3. Word Embedding
2. Collection of materials (Possible all-hands meeting in Feb. or Mar. to set goals for collection by end of year?)
1. "Complete" U.S. collection by June?
1. Current collection tally 
2. "Random" corpus collection at U.M.
3. Subcorpora:
1. student-related material
2. social media material
3. "diverse populations" material
4. Spanish-language corpus 
2. Development of Interpretation Protocol 
1. January preparatory tasks: Preparatory tasks to improve topic modeling interpretation (see below for details)
2. February and March: next series of topic model interpretation workshops.
1. When to schedule the all-hands workshops? 
3. April, May, and June: "Real" interpretation of our corpus (including subcorpora) to address one to three specific research question--e.g.,
• What is the similarity/difference between mainstream news media and student discourse on the humanities? (Or a comparison between our main corpus and any subcorpus)
• How do the humanities and sciences compare in news media?
• How does the "cosmic background radiation" of the humanities compare in the U.S. West vs. East vs. Midwest, vs. South?
• How does our corpus compare to a "random" corpus? 
3. Human Subjects Research
1. Proposal by Abigail:
1. (see Abigail's post in Ryver) 
2. Next steps:
1. We put together a basic outline of what research we want to do that involves human research (the essential idea, but with enough detail to give a sense of the scope, length, and goal of the effort)
2. Alan asks the Mellon what would be needed in the way of approval from them to add this to our methods, and if approval is needed whether we would need to put in a formal proposal. Alan's reading of their document on grant modifications leads him to guess that so long as our research effort in this new direction is relatively small, and so long as we are not reallocating funds from one category such as RA salaries to a new category, then we probably won’t be asked to go through their formal grant modification request process (which seems to be mostly about extending the period or redirecting the use of funds).
4. Goal by end of academic year: position ourselves to address further research questions and embark on analytical and reporting work on our corpus.
1. Project "triage" at end of second year 

2. Technical Development

• VWS
• WMS
• Schedule meeting with Greg Janee to preview repository and dissemination strategy for the project 

3. Summer research camp 2019 (July 1-Aug 2) 

• Call for RAs
• Last year's UCSB call in March
• CSUN call
• Arrangements for Tarika
• Plan for the camp
• Week 1 (July 1-3, partial week): orientation & organization (including a "methods day": concepts of)
• Weeks 2-5 (topic modeling, interpretation, and analyses/reports)
• Initial plan conceived by Alan: (or variant plan: same team makes model, and then in pm session interprets it)
• AM teams:
• We create a limited number of AM teams (e.g., four).
• Each team is given a specific research question to address in any given week--e.g., how do mainstream newspaper and [any subcorpus] compare in discussion of the humanities. 
• During that week, AM teams work on creating, optimizing, and initial macro-interpretation of topic models designed to allow that research question to be addressed.
• By Thursday of each week, each AM teach produces a short report describing their topic model and macro-interpretation. 
• PM teams:
• We create the same limited number of PM teams (e.g., four), staffed by different people than in the AM team except for one or two overlapping people. (Variant concept: AM teams stay together in the afternoon, but shift to a different PM task.)
• Each PM team is assigned a topic model created by an AM team to interpret using our interpretation protocol.
• PM teams can ask AM teams to reiterate or tweak models during the course of the week.
• By Thursday of each week, each PM team produces an analysis/interpretation report answering the research question for which the topic model was created to address. (Null results is a possible result.) 
• End of Week 5 (Aug 1-2) -- Capstone Event
• Conference to present results by teams (presentations to be recorded)
• Task of each presentation team: action item of advocacy based on evidence from topic models 
• Zoom meeting with Advisory Board
• Wrap-up discussion and planning for year 3 of grant 
• This discussion to Include "triage" of the project 
• PIs wrap-up meeting on Monday or Tue after the camp

4. All-hands Meeting Dates

• Possible Thursday 10-noon slots (Pacific): 
• Jan. 31 -- workshop: macro-analysis)
• freeform overview exercise
• then start the reading steps in the process
• need better logging system for analysis and thoughts 
• building into the logging system prompts and examples of the kind of "impressions" we are looking for 
• Feb. 7 -- workshop
• Feb. 28 -- workshop
• Mar. 14 (UM spring break)
• Mar. 28 -- Janee meeting?
• Meetings we need?
• Interpretation Workshops
• Discussion of corpus collection
• Meeting with Greg Janee 

5.

Planning for Future Meetings