WhatEvery1Says [in progress]

4Humanities  is collecting a corpus of public discourse about the humanities (in newspapers, magazines, blogs, reports intended for the public or legislatures, etc.) and analyzing that corpus with digital text-analysis methods. Our hypothesis is that digital methods can help us learn new things about how media pundits, politicians, business leaders, administrators, scholars, students, artists, and others are actually thinking about the humanities.

What U.S. Politicians Say About the Humanities [coming soon]

As part of its “WhatEvery1Says” project to study how the humanities are represented in public discourse, 4Humanities examined United States political discourse during 2009 to 2015 in the legislative and executive branches of the federal government and also the legislative branch of one state (California). Our goal was to learn systematically how politicians talk about the humanities.

In connection with its “WhateEvery1Says” project, 4Humanities collected a Corpus of all U.S. patents mentioning the humanities as main topic or use example issued since 1976 (the first year of full digital text available in the U. S. Patent Office’s searchable archive). We then topic modeled the corpus to see what patterns emerge at the cutting edge where innovation in technology interfaces with the humanities.