This should probably be a post-script to one of my more popular essays here at the Muse, Geocities and the Digital Archive Potential- but check out Snarkmarket's recent post about Dan Cohen, at the George Mason University's Center for History and New Media, releasing a data set of syllabi collected online from 2002-2009. The total comes to a million syllabi and Snarkmarket asks, what can we do with this data? Here is a quote from their post:
So the real question is: what sort of questions should we ask?
I’m open to anything, but my bias goes towards something slightly wacky, rather than, you know, something of scholarly significance. Let’s reverse-engineer an inquiry by starting with a Slate headline!I mean, think about it—a syllabus is
- a collection of related documents,
- an indirect payment to a bunch of authors,
and more, all in one. What might we learn from a million of them all together?
I think this is a very exciting venture, and wanted to promote this as best I could. I would love to see how texts come and go, which ones receive favor in what parts of the country. What would be even more interesting would be to look at who taught the courses and then map out their academic networks. Who studied with whom? Who were the advisors and who were the proteges? That would be more difficult, as I'm sure this data is not encoded in the syllabi themselves, but figuring out the networks and their impacts on the expression of teaching could be very insightful. Figuring out the transmission and reconfiguration of knowledge at the syllabi level- now that would be a great project for the 'Digital Humanities'.
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