Meeting (2019-06-27) - Pre-orientation for New RAs in Summer 2019

0. Preliminary Business

• Introductions
• Logistical issues
• Copyright assignment forms
• Payroll system
• UCSB payroll and timecard system (Kronos) 
• Project collaboration platforms and tools
• WE1S web site
• Ryver
• WE1S Google "shared drive" 
• PBworks site
• Zoom 

Purpose of today's meeting

• Pre-orientation 

1. Context on the WE1S project

• Project history
• Pilot project, 2013-2017
• Mellon grant, 2017-2020
• Project concept 
• study of public discourse on humanities
• cf., Humanities Indicators
• open, reproducible digital humanities methods 
• analytical and advocacy outputs 
• Recent project work
• Collection sources: LexisNexis, Proquest (etc.), Web, social media
• Last year's summer research camp (teams) 
• Academic year 2018-2019 teams:
• Primary corpus team
• Identity and Inclusion team
• Corpus comparison team
• Students and Humanities team (& human subjects research team)
•  Interpretation lab  
• Technical development (Collector, Workspace, Manager) 
• Workplan for summer research camp 2019

2. "Reading" Topic Models

• What topic models are.
• What we can expect to get from topic models:
• "Distant reading" of the gross structure of large-corpora discourse (but based on quantitative analysis).
• Understanding of: 
• topics as "themes"
• topics as "registers of discourse" 
• Guidance on sources and documents to close read.
• Research questions to be addressed using topic models in summer:
• Preliminary "bands" of questions 
• Topic models we will be working with in summer:
• Look-up registry of WE1S collections & topic models
• "Start pages" for WE1S topic models
• "Topic Model Observatory Tools" we will use:
• TMO Guide 
• "Interpretation Protocol" we will use to observe topic models to answer research questions 

3. Example topic model seen through the tools in the WE1S Topic Model Observatory 

• See examples in TMO Guide  

4. Demo of Interpretation Protocol

• WE1S Topic Model Interpretation Protocol 

5. Discussion / Q & A