Alan Liu

While assembling a study corpus of public discourse in English about the humanities (since about 1990 when newspapers began fully digitizing articles), the 4Humanities “WhatEvery1Says” Project (WE1S) encountered the following questions of linguistic usage:

• How are the humanities referred to in newspapers, magazines, and other media in the U.S. compared to the U.K. (and other Commonwealth nations)? Especially, what from a comparative perspective is the overlap/difference between the terms “humanities,” “liberal arts,” “arts,” and “the arts”?
• Do the proportions of such terms change over time in each nation?
• Most practically, which terms (“humanities,” “liberal arts,” “arts,” and “the arts”) should the WE1S project use for searches in newspaper API’s and other resources as it locates texts for its corpus? (Since public discourse in newspapers, magazines, and other media is too ample to be collected in toto, WE1S aims to collect just what might be called the “neighborhood” of discussion of the humanities. The project will then apply text analysis methodology to this neighborhood to refine its understanding of the way the humanities are discussed.)

The following is a preliminary study focused on comparing linguistic usage in the U.S. and U.K.  It is conducted by Alan Liu with assistance from other members of the WE1S research team and the co-leaders of 4Humanities.org. The study will be extended and revised as WE1S research continues.