public humanities research project taking stock of how scholar-activism, democratic and creative knowledge practices, and knowledge from lived experience work toward community-inclusion in public, higher education. Pol.is is a real-time system for gathering, analyzing and understanding what large groups of people think in their own words, enabled by advanced statistics and machine learning. Unlike multiple choice or even interview surveys, Polis allows for an interactive and conversational data collection process. Participants can offer comments on existing questions and submit their own.