Submitted by Scott Kleinman
Professor Scott Kleinman, English Department
Declaring a major in the humanities often incites a skeptically raised eyebrow from friends and loved ones, and the suggestion that the only career you’ll be prepared for is as a barista at the local coffee shop.
Research sponsored by the WhatEvery1Says project (WE1S), co-directed by California State University, Northridge (CSUN) English professor Scott Kleinman, may provide you with new data to counter those skeptical looks. The WE1S project, based at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), has recently been awarded $1.1 million by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Along with Professors Alan Liu and Jeremy Douglass at UCSB and Professor Lindsay Thomas at the University of Miami, Kleinman will spend the next three years studying how the public views the humanities, providing those in the field with the tools to counter negative stereotypes.
The researchers will mine digital media—newspapers, magazines, and blogs—to learn what pundits, politicians, scholars, students, and even the media itself think, say, and write about the humanities. “The reality is, we don’t know which perceptions predominate, and in what contexts,” said Kleinman.
To find those answers and others, Kleinman and his colleagues will employ “topic modeling,” a method of using sophisticated computer algorithms to search vast digital archives of media—from newspapers and magazines to blogs—for words related to the humanities and liberal arts. The computer sorts the words from these materials into groupings of identifiable topics or themes that the researchers can then analyze for answers to their questions about how the public perceives the humanities. Topic modeling is used frequently in the growing field of Digital Humanities, and Kleinman and his collaborators believe that it will allow them to achieve insights into public perceptions of the humanities beneath the familiar clichés and memes.
The research program includes three years of summer research at CSUN by teams of students and faculty, which will be led by Liberal Studies professor Mauro Carassai. Undergraduate and graduate students will assist in collecting and analyzing thousands of documents. In addition, the project will create open protocols and tools for performing humanities research with computers that can analyze large amounts of data. The data collected will be used to formulate strategies and narratives to counter the perception that the humanities are irrelevant in today’s tech-driven world.
An important goal of the WE1S project is to think critically about the procedures needed and design appropriate tools to engage in such a large-scale undertaking in the humanities. As part of the project, the WE1S team will develop a system that allows researchers to generate their own topic models with an interactive browser for studying their implications. The system will be easily reproducible and adaptable for use by other humanities researchers who are increasingly making use of digital approaches to engage in collaborative scholarship and to tackle the materials of humanistic inquiry at scale.
The project’s hypothesis is that digital methods can help us learn new things about how news media sources portray the humanities. For example, are there hidden connections or mismatches between the premises or framing narratives of those arguing for and against the humanities? How do different parts of the world or different kinds of news sources compare in the way they think about the humanities? “The WE1S project will attempt to bypass set debates and well-worn arguments,” Kleinman said, “to find new and more varied ways to advocate for the place of the humanities in today’s society.”
Another core mission of the WE1S project is to study the way racial, ethnic, gender, first-generation student, and other groups are positioned by the media, or position themselves in the media, in relation to the humanities. For example, how does the mainstream media position students and others from particular ethnic groups relative to the humanities? How do media articles by or addressed specifically to such groups compare with mainstream media in how they depict this relationship? In what ways does public opinion about the very ideal of “diversity and inclusion” correlate with public opinion about the humanities?
“We don’t know yet what we’re going to discover,” Kleinman said. “We expect that our methods will yield some surprises that will help us re-think our methods of advocacy and provide us with a greater understanding of how to explain what we do and why it is important.”
More information about WhatEvery1Says can be found on the project’s website: https://we1s.ucsb.edu/.