Visualizing the Centrality of American Anthropology Departments

Grant Otsuki3 Comments

Continuing with my recent data experiments, I’ve produced a new graphic which visually displays which anthropology departments in the US (with a handful from the UK and Canada) produce the most graduates, and in which universities those graduates end up. I think of it as showing which universities tend to exercise the most power in defining what counts as cultural anthropology in the US, and in what institutions they exercise that power.

In the graphic below, the blue dots each represent one university. The size of the dot is proportional to the number of dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology” that university produced. The gray lines connect the institution where the supervisor received their Ph.D. to the institution where their supervisee received their Ph.D. In other words, each line represents one dissertation, and connects the supervisor’s Ph.D. granting institution with the student’s.

This covers the majority of dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology” (which includes some from ethnomusicology, folklore, and a few other fields) from my ProQuest data, which contains supervisor data for dissertations from about 1988, and institution data to much further back.

The universities are roughly divided into four groups. The group in the vertical row at the top are those with highest number of Ph.D. graduates supervising dissertations in cultural anthropology. This includes the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Michigan, Cornell, Indiana, Penn, UCLA, Washington, UT Austin, Northwestern, and Yale.

The group with the next highest number is the column to the middle-right. This group is notable because it includes LSE, Cambridge, and Oxford, which are the only non-US universities in the top two groups. This is followed by the group to the middle left. This is where our friends in theology and missiology seem to be concentrated. The circle at the bottom are universities which had the fewest number of graduates supervising Ph.D.s, usually zero.

The full-size graphic, where the text labels are all legible and the arrowheads (which show which university is sending a graduate to which one as a supervising staff member) is too large to post, but even with this smaller graphic, it’s possible to see a number of interesting (but expected patterns).

One is the sheer level at which the most prolific universities hire their own. The large fan-shaped patterns coming out of the topmost group are supervisors at those institutions that received their own Ph.Ds at those institutions. These patterns do not hold seem to hold as strongly at other levels.

Another pattern is the density of lateral connections among members of the topmost group. This isn’t unexpected, but it highlights the extent to which if you’ve attended any one of these universities, you’re within a tightly knit community that includes all of them, regardless of your specialization within anthropology.

Perhaps most obvious is the density of connections between the top group and every other group on the map. This speaks to the again unsurprising fact that a certain group of universities will tend to have graduates everywhere, while the majority of other schools will produce PhDs, but tend not to be able to place them within the same field if at all.

Attention to the lines can reveal some things that might be interesting to explore further. For instance, there is a dense bundle of lines between the University of Oregon (in the second group) and the University of San Francisco (in the fourth). This probably comes down to one or two super prolific supervisors, but it would be worth looking to see if there is anything more to the connection. Another similar bundle exists between Cornell and Temple University.

What this particular image doesn’t show well is that some institutions in the “lower tiers” actually seem to have a tremendous influence on the higher ones. This usually goes from the major British universities to the top American ones: LSE and Cambridge especially, but also Oxford. Unfortunately, thesis data for the UK is kept in another database that I’ve not yet had the chance to explore, so I don’t know if this relationship goes both ways. I suspect it doesn’t.

The Mystery of Fuller Theological Seminary

Grant Otsuki1 Comment

A project that I’ve been working on from time to time for the past five years is to look for patterns in large quantities of anthropology-related data that I scrape from the web. You can see some of my past experiments on this stuff here.

Since overhauling this website, I’ve decided to revisit one of these projects, which looks at anthropology dissertation metadata from the Proquest database. The data I’ve collected includes just over 17,000 records for Ph.D. dissertations tagged with “cultural anthropology.” The records include the title, the author, the year of publication, and the institution. Newer records include abstracts and supervisor (or committee) names. The data is US-centric (ProQuest gets their dissertation data from the Library of Congress), although most Canadian universities are included, as well as a few from other countries.

If you scan the records to find the universities with the largest number of anthropology dissertations, the names that appear are not that surprising. Universities with large and old departments, like the University of Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, UCLA, and UC Berkeley top the list. (You can see one of my older visualizations of dissertation numbers by institution on the project page.)

Recently, I went back to the data to try and figure out other ways to think about which universities were responsible for defining what anthropology in the US. I decided to look not just for universities that produced a lot of anthropology dissertations, but also those that produced students who also supervised dissertations in anthropology. In other words, which universities are most successfully reproducing anthropologists?

The list is mostly the same as the one for the straight count of most dissertations, except for one major difference. A place called Fuller Theological Seminary in California has produced at least seven PhDs who each went on to advise at least one student who also wrote a dissertation in cultural anthropology. This makes Fuller more central to the reproduction of cultural anthropology (at least according to this measure) than UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, Brown, MIT, McGill, Michigan State, the New School, Princeton, Rutgers, and a few other famous names.

Before this, I had never heard of Fuller, but Wikipedia tells me that it is a “a multidenominational Christian evangelical seminary in Pasadena, California, with regional campuses in the western United States. The seminary has 2,897 students from 90 countries and 110 denominations.”

Clicking through to their website, I arrived at a description of their PhD program in Intercultural Studies which appears to be where anthropology is taught at Fuller. I don’t know anything more about what Fuller teaches, but the webpage suggests that the degree is focused on missiology, “a multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural field of study” that examines “the nature of missionary work.” (Wikipedia says that in Europe, missiology is known as “intercultural theology.” This sounds like something anthropology would be useful in, and explains why Fuller is not alone in my data as a theology school in producing anthropology dissertations.

National Differences in Anthropology Conferences

Grant Otsuki

I’m currently helping to organize the joint conference of the Australian Anthropological Society (AAS) and the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aoteroa New Zealand (ASAA/NZ). I’ve been part of conference organizing before, so I didn’t expect to run into anything too confusing, but even within the English-language anthropology world, there are quite large differences, even if the basic unit of a conference is everywhere the fifteen-minute paper.

Because of funding limitations and my lack of imagination, I’ve only ever attended the largest conferences more than once: AAA, 4S (an STS conference), and SCA (mostly because I was a student board member.) I’ve also been to a CASCA (the Canadian conference) when it was held jointly with AES, a JASCA (the Japanese national conference,) one for the Society for East Asian Anthropology, and a couple smaller ones in Japan.) (The ASAANZ meeting I’m helping to organize will be the first one of these I attend. I’ve never been to a meeting in Europe, South America, Africa, or Asia outside of Japan and Hong Kong.)

Between all of these and the Australian/New Zealand conferences, there are two big (and unexpected to me) differences: panel formats and food.

Panel Formats

AAA, SCA, CASCA, and JASCA, and I’m sure many other conferences tend, to be based on what I’ll call the AAA-style panel. Someone will come up with a proposal for a panel, and find 5 or 6 other people to present papers or be discussants. They will all get their abstracts written by the deadline, and everyone’s contribution goes in as one package, which is also accepted or rejected as one set.

These conferences generally also accept individual paper proposals, in which a paper can be submitted without already being part of a panel. If the paper is accepted, then the organizers will put together a panel consisting of other individual papers.

The relevant characteristic here is that papers are either assessed as one panel, or they are assessed as an individual paper. There is no in-between option. And whereas individual papers go through one round of screening, papers on panels go through two: once when they are accepted by the panel organizer, and another when they panel as a whole is accepted by the conference organizers.

A few years ago, 4S started doing “open panels” which was new to me. For these panels, the conference organizers would invite proposals for panels without any associated paper proposals. Panel proposals would be accepted or rejected, and the organizers with accepted panels would then go out and invite paper proposals, which they would accept or reject.

In this system, the panels are assessed once by the conference organizers, but the rest of the selection work is done by the panel organizers. 4S continues to also accept “closed” panel proposals, which are the same as the AAA style of panel.

I recently learned that in the Australian system, all panels are treated like 4S-style open panels. The conference organizers assess only panel proposals. Panel proposals do not need to have any papers in place, and in fact, the conference rules require panels to be open to public submissions. (Although there seems to be a tacit understanding that some panels will have their roster of paper presenters already fixed.) So there are two deadlines for the AAS-style conference: one for the panels, and the one for all the papers submitted to those panels.

I can see some advantages to this approach. Labor that has to be done by the conference organizers in the AAA model is distributed across dozens of panel organizers in the AAS model.

The AAS model also makes it easier to accept a higher proportion of papers. In the AAA model, a paper on a panel rejected from the conference is gone from that conference. Especially with the way that AAA sets deadlines, a paper on a rejected panel cannot become an individual paper submission. (I have heard of rejected panels being accepted as poster sessions, however.) In the AAS model, some panels will receive a lot of paper submissions and reject some number of papers. But these papers can still survive by being transferred for consideration on other panels that may have received fewer submissions. I haven’t seen relative acceptance rates, but it wouldn’t surprise me if AAS-style conferences had much higher ones.

One question that I can’t answer yet is how this affects the feel, if not the quality of panels. I once presented as part of an open panel at 4S, and it felt like a very scattered grouping of papers that did not lead to much interesting discussion. The quality of AAA panels varies wildly, but for the good ones, it’s clear that somebody has given thought to why this group of people belonged together, and this is usually reflected in the quality of the Q&A and discussion after the papers.

Not having been to an AAS or ASAANZ meeting before, I’m curious about the effect of having all panels as open panels.

Food

At only one conference I’ve attended so far has there been food included in the conference registration fee. This was the SCA meeting held at Cornell University in 2016. At every other conference, it’s only been the finger foods at receptions that have been included. There are always conference dinners, but these cost extra. The printed conference programs usually have good suggestions for nearby restaurants. At AAA, the places to eat in and near the venue are always packed to capacity with anthropologists at lunch and dinner (except for McDonald’s.) I assumed that food was included at the SCA at Cornell because there was nowhere nearby we could go to eat.

If you’re planning to come to Wellington for AAS/ASAANZ in 2020, I have good news for you. Your conference registration fee will include lunch on each day of the conference, plus “morning and afternoon teas.” These are what people back home call coffee breaks. I expect there will be cookies and coffee in addition to “tea.” In fact, a frightening amount of our budget will be used to feed you. Much of your registration fee is going to go straight into your (or someone else’s) stomach.

When I originally started putting the budget together for this conference, I did not include expenses for any meals, but this was quickly corrected. It seems that in Australia, New Zealand, and much of Europe, the conference’s food is part of the experience. In fact, it is, as more than one person told me, the thing that people remember about a conference, more than any talk they hear.

I’ve had good food while at conferences, but rarely from the conference. With any luck, we’ll have something delicious for you if you make the trip to Wellington in December.

Fake Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Grant Otsuki

Lianghao Dai at natureindex (via Ulrike Felt on Twitter):

‘Fake’ interdisciplinary collaborations (IDCs) happen when scientists of various disciplines put their names on a joint project application for an interdisciplinary research project, but no knowledge integration occurs, because they end up working on their individual or mono-disciplinary research separately.

Because an authentic IDC requires continuous investment of time and intellectual input, or in Klein’s3 words “rounds of iterations”, with high risk of no actual output in the near future, the motivation to spend time going really deeply into team collaboration is lacking.

In Japan, people might talk about participation in “fake IDCs” as the tatemae for their research: the collaboration is the outward appearance they need to secure funding, but their actual research aims are different. It’s not uncommon for this to be done in order to get the money to cover basic work expenses (such as computer equipment, software) that are no longer covered by their own universities due to cutbacks.