The UCSB local chapter of 4Humanties meets Wednesday Feb. 4th, 1-2:30pm, in South Hall 2509 to focus on two current 4Humanities projects in which the local chapter is engaged. One is the soon-to-be announced 4Humanities prize contest for student humanities advocacy. Discussion will center on pre-release contest and publicity materials, planning to encourage institutions to organize “creativity workshops” for the contest, and progress on recruiting contest judges. The other project is WhatEvery1Says, a research initiative to analyze public discourse about the humanities using data-mining methods. The project team will show some early test results and ask meeting participants for feedback about general strategy and such specific issues as what non-academic magazines, newspapers, and blogs should be sampled to harvest different political, cultural, national, and other perspectives.
All posts by Alan Liu
“The Humanities Matter!” Infographic
The University College London (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities–in collaboration with 4Humanities–has created a new The Humanities Matter! infographic with statistics and arguments for the humanities in high-impact visual form. [Download PDF] Countering clichéd, factually ungrounded criticisms, The Humanities Matter! draws on published statistics and a crowdsourced poll to give a shout out to the humanities in sections on “What the Humanities Do,” “But the Evidence Shows,” and “Culture is Important.”
The digital version of The Humanities Matter! is a large, vertical-format banner available as a PDF file. A limited number of printed posters made from the infographic is being mailed to newspapers and magazines, national councils and commissions, public and private funding agencies, humanities centres and programs, and digital-humanities associations and programs around the world.
As a follow-up to the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities’ “Quantifying Digital Humanities” infographic from 2012 (PDF), The Humanities Matter! starts a more expansive effort by the Center and 4Humanities to gather statistics and create infographics about the humanities. The Humanities Matter! is part of the 4Humanities Humanities Infographics initiative, including Infographics Friday online posts.
4Humanities invites additional statistics (including from more parts of the world) so that it can expand the infographics initiative and, funds allowing, produce future versions.
The Humanities Matter! was created by the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities under the supervision of its director Melissa Terras, who is also a co-leader of 4Humanities. Terras collected data for the infographic with assistance from Ernesto Priego (an international correspondent for 4Humanities), Lindsay Thomas (lead research assistant for 4Humanities), Victoria Smith (research assistant, Humanities Computing, U. Alberta), and the other co-leaders of 4Humanities: Christine Henseler, Alan Liu, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Stéfan Sinclair.
Please download The Humanities Matter! and help 4Humanities circulate it ; feel free to print in small or large format and distribute. The Humanities Matter! is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Guide to Issues in Humanities Advocacy
Gathered here are bibliographies compiled by 4Humanities participants and local chapters intended to provide background on public discourse in the humanities, including definitions of the humanities, resources on the humanities “crisis,” readings on emerging models of humanities scholarship and pedagogy, and research on “framing” public debates. (See Guide)
What Are the Humanities?
Here are five good, short definitions of the humanities sampled from a variety of sources and more than one nation–something like a starter kit on the humanities (and their overlapping relation with what different countries also call “the liberal arts,” “the arts,” “humanities and arts,” and sometimes also the humanistically-oriented “social sciences”….
4Humanities@UCSB Beginning of Year Meeting (2014-15)
4Humanities@UCSB will hold its initial meeting of the 2014-15 academic year on Monday, November 3, 3-4:30 pm, in South Hall 2509. Continuing and new participants are invited. A surprise, high-visibility new 4Humanities project will be announced at this meeting.
“Students: Study the Humanities” Video
“Students: Study the Humanities” — a short video produced by the Student Advocates for the Future of the Humanities group (StuHum): An affiliate of 4Humanities, StuHum is a student-led group whose mission includes “reaching out to other students using social media, short video and articles” in order to “communicate the importance of the humanities in […]
Paul Jay’s The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies
Newly published from Palgrave Macmillan is Paul Jay’s The Humanities “Crisis” and the Future of Literary Studies. Jay, who is Professor of English and a Fellow at the Center for Interdisciplinary Thinking at Loyola University Chicago, examines in the book recent debates about the role of the humanities in higher education. As he describes, I […]