4Humanities’s The Humanities Matter! infographic — with arguments and statistics for why the humanities matter — has been updated! It can be downloaded as a large, vertical PDF file or image file (or as production files to facilitate adapting it under its open license).

Professor Madeleine Sorapure — Teaching Professor at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and an Associate Dean in UCSB’s Division of Undergraduate Education in the College of Letters & Science — undertook the task of updating the infographic (originally created in 2014 by 4Humanities with the University College London’s Centre for Digital Humanities) with statistics from new sources and findings from new surveys conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The original infographic was a hit. Many people sent 4Humanities photos of printed copies hanging outside their offices or at events. (See, for example, photo of the infographic hung at the opening of the youth-led Teen Reading Lounge book club at the Erie County Public Library in Pennsylvania.) It turns out that humanists need a flag!

Professor Sorapure — whose teaching and research focus on multimedia communication, including web and document design, data visualization, and the use of online AI tools for text visualization and analysis — updated the infographic to use it as a reading in a new course she helped create for first-year undergraduates at UCSB. Titled “INT W 1: Introduction to a Letters & Science Education,” the course is required for all incoming students  (approximately 5,000 new UCSB students in 2023-24). The course introduces the substance and significance of a liberal arts education by providing readings and videos explaining how knowledge is produced and how research is conducted in different disciplinary areas. Helping to represent  the humanities,  the updated The Humanities Matter! infographic gives arguments for the importance of studying humanities subjects; and it provides data about the impact of the humanities on personal and working lives. (Updates in infographic are for the the U.S. context. But the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License of the infographic also allows adapting for other regions.)