This project utilizes database design, text mining, and data visualization to create a navigable interface for dissertation data. The American Historical Association (AHA) gathered data on 58,723 history dissertations from 1873 to 2022. This data includes a dissertation’s title, author, advisor, school, and year of completion. After the preprocessing and data cleaning, AHA dissertation data was loaded into a database. This data is displayed on the webpage through tables, allowing users to browse and filter scholars. Once a user selects a scholar, they are navigated to the scholar’s individual page where their genealogical data is listed and visualized. A scholar’s genealogy is constructed by their direct academic relationships to other scholars. The core of a genealogy is a scholar’s advisor and their advisees. A network is constructed by tracing other direct paths to the scholar from these core relationships, such as their advisor’s other advisees, their advisees’ students, etc. The result is a scholar’s academic family tree.
These academic family trees expose connections and broader patterns within the historical profession. By traversing generations of scholars and visualizing their academic forefathers and descendants, a new perspective on historiography can be found. Academic genealogies showcase how the interpersonal relationships formed through doctoral advising are linked to intellectual trends.
The poster will present its information by focusing on a sample academic genealogy and explaining how it can be used to unveil the intellectual influence of scholars through their mentorship. Because the academic family tree is a key element of this project, the visual format of poster presentation will allow for conference attendees to view and analyze a tree for themselves. The tree visualization will be accompanied by an image of the database to provide insight into the dataset, as well as additional explanatory text.