Making the Humanities Public

An Undergraduate Collaborative Research Group

Sponsored by the UC Santa Barbara English Department and affiliated with 4Humanities.org

Making the Humanities Public is a team of nine undergraduates at UC Santa Barbara supervised by Professor Alan Liu and Ph.D. student Jamal Russel. Sponsored with stipends from English Department alumnus John Arnhold (’75) and research funds from UCSB’s Division of Undergraduate Education, the team worked during spring and winter quarters of academic year 2016-2017 used research from the in-progress 4Humanities WhatEvery1Says project (WE1S) to study how the humanities are discussed in journalistic media and then created humanities advocacy projects informed by their study.

  • The students studied the WE1S project’s topic models of articles related to the humanities published between 2010 and 2014 in the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
  • They went back to sample individual articles to close read the material
  • They wrote a white paper with their analyses and conclusions, including recommendations for humanities advocacy (“Making the Humanities Public — A White Paper”).
  • They created several example humanities advocacy projects that act on their recommendations:
    • Dystopian Cartoon & Interactive Infographic Project (by Darya Behroozi, Sonia Htoon, and Bella Solorzano)
    • “The Humanities Are Closer Than You Think” Project (by Claire Lowinger-Iverson, Francisco Olvera, and Noelle Leong)
    • Timeline and Storymap of the Digital Humanities Project (by Phi Do, Sydney Hannum, Karina Lucero)
  • They designed a social media publicity campaign for their projects.