The Hidden Gold Mine: How AI is Unlocking New Frontiers in Humanities and Social Science Research
By Andrea DeHaan |
Zubair Barkat, a doctoral student in sociology, presented his poster at USU's Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Center launch on Jan. 14, 2025. (Photo Credit: USU/Sydney Dahle)
On Jan. 14, Utah State University celebrated the launch of the new Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (DSAI) Center. There, crammed in alongside the other poster session participants, including a few knee-high robots excitedly bouncing up and down at one display, were three graduate students presenting research from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences.
Doctoral student Zubair Barkat identified an unexplored area of research in environmental sociology — the study of how humans interact with the natural environment.
Barkat said that ranchlands are becoming increasingly valued, because they make up more than a third of the world’s ice-free land. In the United States, he said, they comprise an acreage equivalent to the size of Mexico.
“But if you look into ranchland social science research,” Barkat said, “if there are 61 articles on ecology, [only] one article [is focused] on ranchland social science.”
So Barkat’s research involves using artificial intelligence to sort through countless hours of interviews with ranchers — essentially studying videos that are publicly available on platforms like YouTube — to better understand the human side of ranching as well as to gather data from less visible sources of study, such as ranchers who are women.
This project has uncovered more than 100 videos that meet one of four criteria being studied by the sociologists. Beyond making transcription faster and more affordable, AI tools have also helped graduate students like Barkat analyze comments shared alongside the videos, which is another place to explore attitudes about ranching and ranchers in the U.S.
What “used to take at least three to five hours for a trained researcher” can now be accomplished in “one to two minutes,” Barkat said. “It's a sort of an underutilized gold mine for researchers.”
For Logan Bolan, a Master in Anticipatory Intelligence student, research utilizing geographic information system (GIS) maps to respond to climate shifts in the Arctic is personal.
Bolan, who hails from Alaska, proposes using GIS data to analyze and predict how thawing ice in the next few decades is likely to create sustainability as well as biosecurity challenges. His research explores ways the GIS data could be used to help agencies involved in everything from U.S. agriculture to national security plan for the impacts of a shrinking permafrost.
“The whole point of anticipatory intelligence, not artificial intelligence, is to give us time so that policymakers can respond … before things happen,” Bolan said.
“These RTS (retrogressive thaw slump) events as they're called, they're kind of unpredictable,” Bolan said, referencing the landslides that occur when ground ice melts, but added that “we at least have new tools, new data sets that allow us to train AI models to find those RTS events.”
In a nutshell, Bolan’s research involves using AI to analyze maps and survey results to identify areas where existing and proposed projects (buildings, farms, security sites) in the Arctic might be compromised by dwindling ice.
Thanks to geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI), Bolan said, “We have imagery, and every time we load new imagery, we have an AI model. It can tell us, OK, this is where a new RTS event happens. … And that [buys] us time.”
CHaSS graduate student Nikki Christensen came by her AI innovation while looking to make the English composition courses she was teaching “more engaging.”
Christensen noticed that some undergraduate students struggled to find entry into the texts they were reading, and wanted to help them become better at analyzing, comparing, and evaluating college-level literature, ultimately becoming better readers and, in turn, better writers.
She gave students and AI the same prompt to draw a fictional monster, and, in doing so, taught the students important skills about feedback and outcomes.
“I ended up having … them draw monsters with the same prompt. And then I used the AI to merge these monsters into one to teach the principles of synthesizing text into one essay,” Christensen said. “I found that once students were able to … see a visualization of it, they were able to then transfer it to the written word in an easier way.”
The exercise has also been a lesson in the revision process. Students had to train the AI to create a drawing more like their own.
“By altering their prompt, they were able to get the AI to resemble the monster more closely,” which, Christensen said, could also “teach them the power of their words.”
One of the DSAI Center’s priorities is to help generate connections across the university, and, in doing so, become a resource in data science and AI for the state and beyond. Both the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the Center for Anticipatory Intelligence are affiliates of the new project, which was founded by several departments in the College of Engineering, the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business, and the College of Science.
At the DSAI Center launch, Christensen could be heard telling poster session onlookers that her project might feel a bit different from the other projects they’d encountered. But she was also quick to remind people that the field of data science and artificial intelligence isn’t limited to STEM majors.
“I think anything that you're doing with AI can easily be translated into a bit more research since it's such a new subject,” Christensen said. With help from emerging technologies like these, “you can really go further with it.”
WRITER
Andrea DeHaan
Communications Editor
College of Humanities and Social Sciences
435-797-2985
andrea.dehaan@usu.edu
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