Humanities Research Lab
The Humanities Research Lab in Sierra Hall 194 is a space for students and faculty to collaborate on research that makes a contribution to scholarship in the Humanities. Its mission is especially to engage undergraduate students in research activities beyond the work they do for class assignments. The Lab is outfitted with 20 Windows laptops and 5 Macbook Pros, projection equipment, and movable furniture and whiteboards so that the space can be adapted to a wide variety of uses.
In Spring 2016 the Lab was piloted by four faculty-led research projects. Since then, the number of faculty-led student research groups has continued to grow.
- Director: Michael Bryson, Ph.D.
- Location: Sierra Hall, Room 194
- Email: michael.bryson@csun.edu
Projects
WhatEvery1Says is a large-scale computational text analysis project initiated by 4Humanities and including participants from the University of California, Santa Barbara and the University of Miami, as well as California State University, Northridge. We are collecting tens of thousands of online articles from newspapers, magazines, and blogs to form a corpus of public discourse on the humanities. By analyzing the corpus using a variety of statistical methods, we aim to explore the shape of contemporary discourse on the value of the humanities, both to debunk myths about the “uselessness” of the humanities and to discover new ways to communicate their value.
- Project Website
- Faculty Leader: Scott Kleinman
The Environmental Digital Humanities lab introduces students to the intersections of environmental history, legal archives, and the digital humanities. Students who participate in this lab create mind maps using digital software XMIND PRO in order to organize data scanned at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The focus of these records center upon two major themes including the racialization of space with regard to Mexican-American experiences in the Civilian Conservation Corps (1933) and ecological debates centering on Japanese-American internment during World War II at the Colorado Indian Reservation in Poston, Arizona. Students learn how to analyze data based upon themes dealing with racialized discourses centered on human-spatial relations. A co-authored publication written by Professor Stevie Ruiz and students enrolled in his lab will be submitted to two journals entitled Resilience: A Journal of Environmental Humanities and Radical Teacher, documenting student experiences and pedagogy working with digital humanities in the field of critical environmental studies.
Faculty Leader: Stevie Ruiz
The Cognitive Science of Religion Lab Group uses methods and theories from the cognitive sciences to understand, and explain, both similarities and differences in religious ideas and practices cross-culturally. The lab is currently conducting two projects (1) to better understand why social movements that include ideas about past lives are popular in contemporary Southern California and (2) to understand how common rituals following bereavement and the separation from loved-ones affect the cognitive representation of such individuals.
- Faculty Leader: Claire White
Dr. Wiltberger is collaborating with youth in El Salvador and CSUN students to create an online digital archive that documents oral histories of a mass repatriation of Salvadoran refugees during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war, the largest refugee repatriation in Latin American history. This project utilizes methodologies and modes of dissemination, including oral histories and accessible digital and visual media, so that a community in El Salvador can lead and participate in the research process, and so that the archive can be accessible and of benefit to the community and its diaspora of migrants, as well as the public. The forthcoming project was named a semi-finalist in the 2018 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize competition of the Center for Documentary Studies. Once published, the archive will be featured in the special digital collections of the Oviatt Library.
Faculty Leader: Joseph Wiltberger
The Carcerality Research Lab, coordinated by professors Martha Escobar and Leticia Lara, conducts research on issues of incarceration in California. Currently the lab is working on the project “Impact of Language and Migrant Status on Parole Decisions for Incarcerated Latina/o Migrants.” This work examines the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) parole process for 138 men and women “lifers” in three different prisons. Particular focus is placed on how language and migrant status inform the ability of imprisoned Latina/o migrants with life sentences to access parole.
Faculty Leader: Martha Escobar
This semester the Asian American Cultural Studies Lab is working with the San Fernando Valley Japanese American Citizens League (SFV JACL) and with a museum exhibit by the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition (TCDSC) to produce researched blog articles. Our community writing project this semester compares the discourse of a local instance of Japanese American incarceration during the Second World War to the current discourse of the Presidential Executive Order regarding foreign terrorist entry into the United States.
Faculty Leader: Tomo Hattori
Dr. Baugh’s research group examines the intersection of religion and environmental attitudes among religious communities in California. In particular, we are interested in ways that race, ethnicity, and class influence environmental values in religious communities. Student researchers help collect and analyze data from focus groups and interviews.
Faculty Leader: Amanda Baugh
