UC Humanities Centers Collaborative Projects
The Center for Ideas and Society will host three innovative projects funded through the UC Humanities Research Initiative (UCHRI) in collaboration with other UC Humanities Centers. The projects are designed to draw representatives from the participating campuses together to promote and disseminate research, develop technological skills and encourage networking among humanities scholars.
Metadata Central: Digital Scholarship and Outreach
Metadata Central is an intensive workshop for UC humanities graduate students with (or without) their faculty advisors. Ten UC students, one from each campus, will be selected to participate in this workshop, centered around two on-site sessions at UCLA in Winter and Spring quarter 2016. From January-June 2016, students will discuss progress and practice with their cohort in regular web-based meetings to gain expertise, learn about available resources, and build a metadata community of practice.
Hosted by UCLA, this project focuses on understanding the complex of metadata in digital humanities research projects, based on other projects currently in development. UCLA has a long history of developing digital projects, such as the Hypercities project and the Ancient Egyptian Architecture Online (AEGARON) project. UCLA is currently developing a digital platform to connect disparate data types to three-dimensional models of objects, architecture or concepts. This platform allows analysis through a combination and integration of different information (e.g. quantitative, qualitative, visual, aural). By linking this information to the model (either to a relevant location on the model or to the model as a whole), comparisons can be made that allow generalizations as well as drilling down to finer detail.
In the course of this and other digital humanities projects the extreme importance of developing proper metadata standards has come to the fore. This is a core capability that is rapidly becoming an important tool for any humanities scholar. Metadata are also a vital part of making humanities research open to sharing with the general public, but doing so often requires a different type of organization of metadata. Deciding on research design and output are among the decisions that need to be made before embarking on a project.
The current project invites a group of graduate students (one from each participating campus) to work alone or with their chosen faculty member to develop a relevant project. These projects can make use of the Immersive Humanities platform or another complicated database structure.
Proposals due December 1, 2015
More information can be found on our funding page.
UC Public Scholars Initiative
Capitalizing on the recent Mellon award to UC Davis to support a Public Scholars Program, this UC-wide collaboration opens the program to other UC campuses and allows UCR’s Center for Ideas and Society to select a PhD graduate student and faculty member to participate.
The Public Scholars Program at UC Davis addresses two separate but related goals: supporting community-engaged scholarship and broadening the career opportunities of humanities PhDs. The students selected at participating UC campuses will join (either remotely or in person) in a Public Scholars seminar at UC Davis in Spring 2016 that will introduce them to the intellectual and practical aspects of public humanities scholarship. During the seminar, each student will work with his or her faculty mentor to design a community-engaged project. During the summer following the seminar each student will work for the community partner associated with his or her project.
Both the UCR student and faculty member will be invited to attend the March 7, 2016 launch of the UC Davis Public Scholars Program in order to network and build a community among the participants. The student will receive a $4500 stipend for the summer internship and both student and faculty member will receive up to $350 for travel to the March launch event.
Proposals due January 15, 2016
More information can be found on our funding page.
Write to Change the World: The OpEd Project
Working with top universities, foundations, think tanks, nonprofits, corporations and community organizations, the OpEd project aims to scout and train under-represented experts to take thought leadership positions in their fields; connect them with a national network of high-level media mentors; and vet and channel the best new experts and ideas directly to media gatekeepers who need them, across all platforms.
The Write to Change the World Fellowship program will build faculty’s capacity to translate their research for the public and to engage in debate at a national level based on their areas of expertise. The focus will be on increasing underrepresented voices within these debates. Working in partnership with the OpEd Project, the fellowship will host three one-day workshops led by OpEd Project facilitators, at UC Davis, UC Merced, and UCLA, with 20 fellows in each workshop, from across all disciplines and nine campuses (UCSF, UCSB, UCI, UCR, UCSD, UCSC), for a total of 60 fellows.
The lack of diverse voices in the US media is an open secret. The numbers are striking: in legacy media, for example, women represent only 20 percent of voices in print. The Write to Change the World program will develop thought leaders and allow faculty to translate their work for a broader audience, contributing to a public conversation. The program aim to increase the number of underrepresented voices in the media in order to influence national debate on their areas of expertise. The project will equip faculty with the tools to translate their research for the public, build networks, and disseminate research beyond the academic world. The goal is that increased diversity in media voices will translate into a more equal and just society populated by educated, informed citizens, and will lead to the discovery of innovative solutions to challenges we face.
Faculty can apply online by February 1, 2016. Only 6 fellows will be selected from the UC Riverside campus.
More information can be found on our funding page.