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1media/Screen Shot 2020-04-12 at 6.36.38 PM_thumb.png2020-04-12T16:38:45-07:00Sam Meurer886185f60296eed6debb66f1b24ed06967c75fe3356591This bio page of David Deustch, associate professor at University of Alabama, serves as an example of how my data was collected.plain2020-04-12T16:38:45-07:00Sam Meurer886185f60296eed6debb66f1b24ed06967c75fe3
1media/About the Project Background.png2019-11-20T23:14:11-08:00About the Project44image_header2020-04-15T08:16:50-07:00
Background
Origin
During the Fall 2019 semester of my undergrad, I enrolled in Introduction to Digital Humanities at Arkansas State University and stepped into the expansive and mystifying field that is digital humanities. Throughout this course, I learned about many different DH methods, applied literary readings to the field as a whole, and constructed various types of visualizations and analyses. For the final in this course, the class was asked to construct a portfolio that analyzed a specific dataset (original or found) and used two different DH methods to represent the dataset.
Digital humanities is a collaborative effort. This was at the forefront of my mind during the introduction course and this notion crept into my mind when deciding what data set to create for this portfolio. Collaboration is key in many large-scale projects, whether it is grounded in the digital humanities or another discipline. Collaboration creates a network between academics throughout their discipline or outside of their discipline (interdisciplinary), grants opportunities that could not be granted through solo research-work, and offers the chance to explore new interests and ideas outside of the academic's personal bubble.
The Project
English Professors at R1: Doctoral Universities in the South: 2019 - 2020 is a project that visualizes the makeup of English tenure-track professors at public-R1 universities in the South according to race and gender, creates a network of professors according to research interests (Professor A is interested in Subject A), and acts as a central directory for professors to communicate with one another through Scalar's mapping tool.
Quick Terms for Understanding the Project
1: R1: Doctoral University - As of the 2019 update, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education classifies R1: Doctoral Universities as having both a very high level of research activity and per capita in such research activity. There are 131 total institutions that have this classification.
2: The South - For this project, the following southern states will be included: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. There are 33 R1 institutions in the Southern states listed, and these are the institutions I looked at to compose my data set.
Data
Building my data set involved rigourous web browsing and a keen eye for information. To obtain my data about each professor, I first navigated to their professional academic bios listed on their home university's website. These pages are attached in the directory of this project. From here, I looked for the following infromation about each professor:
Race
Gender
Location of Highest Degree Earned (P.h.D., M.F.A., M.A., some B.A. degrees for creative writing professors)
Research and Teaching Interests
Descriptions of each of these data points can be found in the annotations below. If none of this data could be found from the main source, I looked to secondary sources including, but not limited to: personal C.V's, academic bios on other sites (LinkedIn, academia,edu, researchgate.net, personal wesbites), etc. This is also detailed in the annotations below.
Spreadsheet
This is an example view of my spreadsheet constructed for this project. In total, there are 1267 professors and 3193 research and teaching interests documented. The spreadsheet is divided into 6 different sheets which I used for different visualizations you will see throughout this project. The spreadsheet is also color-coded by individual states which I used to organize the data during its construction.
If you would like to view the spreadsheet, feel free to download it from my Github account below.
