4Humanities@UCSB

4Humanities@UCSB functions both independently as a Research Focus Group of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) at UC Santa Barbara and as a local chapter of the international 4Humanities initiative. As a local IHC Research Focus Group, 4Humanities@UCSB meets periodically during the year around a few topics and readings–e.g., core issues in public discourse on the humanities, current media technologies for advocacy, etc. Beyond discussion-style activity, 4Humanities@UCSB also has a practical production-shop dimension. The group conducts research and creates content for 4Humanities by studying public discourse about the humanities, writing posts related to humanities advocacy, working on collaborative humanities advocacy projects, etc. The group also link ups with local chapters of 4Humanities at other universities.

4Humanities@UCSB co-convenors: Linda Adler-Kassner (Writing Program), and Alan Liu (English, UCSB)

Research Assistant & Graduate-Student Coordinator: Lindsay Thomas (English, UCSB)

Research Assistant & Graduate-Student Coordinator: Ashley Champagne (English, UCSB)

Resources and Information: 4Humanities@UCSB Planning Board · Participant List 2013-4 · 4Humanities@UCSB Private Library

The Work Humanists Do: An Interview with 4Hum’s New International Correspondent

Lauren Horn Griffin is 4Humanities.org’s new International Correspondent! She will write on humanities advocacy projects, humanities issues, the relation of the humanities to society, and specific humanities initiatives. Lauren is currently working as the Communications Coordinator for the nonprofit Institute for Diversity and City Life while she finishes her Ph.D., and she is a passionate advocate for the humanities. I caught up with her in Santa Barbara for a chat over coffee to see why the humanities are important to her.

4Humanities@UCSB Meeting #2 (2014-15)

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.

DHSoCal 4Humanities Research Workshop (CSUN, May 16, 2014)

Members of the local chapters of 4Humanities at UCSB and UCLA will join the chapter at CSUN (California State University, Northridge) for Southern California’s annual, day-long 4Humanities DHSoCal research workshop. (Last year, 4Humanities@UCSB hosted the meeting at UC Santa Barbara.) The workshop’s agenda this year focuses on the 4Humanities “WhatEvery1Says” project, but will also include […]

4Humanities@UCSB Meeting — “WhatEvery1Says” Project (Text Preparation Team) (April 30, 2014)

In this meeting to continue work on the “WhatEvery1Says” project, members of 4Humanities@UCSB working on the text-preparation team will perform the following tasks: Share notes on and fine-tune their ongoing work in archiving and transforming documents from the corpus for a sample set stored on Google Drive. Discuss and split up next-stage work. The next […]

4Humanities@UCSB Meeting — “WhatEvery1Says” Project (Text Preparation Team) (March 19, 2014)

Research workshop meeting on WhatEvery1Says project. At this important meeting, members of the RFG will work collaboratively to standardize a method of archiving and extracting text from the public discourse about the humanities collected in the WhatEvery1Says corpus (see notes). Working from a detailed set of protocols created by member Jeremy Douglass, the group will […]

“Global Humanities?” — 4Humanities Discussion Forum with Rens Bod (March 12, 2014)

How can we think comparatively about what the humanities mean in multiple areas of the world with educational and funding systems not necessarily commensurable with U.S.-style “liberal arts”? For example, how are the humanities and arts talked about elsewhere? How are their histories and traditions different? How are they positioned relative to other disciplines, institutions, […]