There are a series of jokes floating around academia about “academic relatives,” most recently this little bit of brilliant whimsy from Jorge Cham’s Piled Higher and Deeper entitled “Your Academic Genealogy.” Funny, yes, but there’s also something potentially important here about the lineages of academic thought, so I did a little digging and thus far have been completely unable to locate something that I would have thought that someone would have already assembled: an online searchable database that mapped adviser-advisee relationships in IR. So far as I know, there is no such thing. Not yet.
I think that a map like this would be a very useful tool for all kinds of research on the sociology of the field, besides all the ways it would serve as fodder for intriguing hallway and bar conversations at conferences (“I never knew that X was your grand-adviser; did you ever meet her? What was she like?”) It would also be a tool for a certain amount of reflexive self-discovery; I recently learned that my grand-adviser was a labor historian named Henry Pelling, and that my PhD adviser Ira Katznelson’s undergraduate thesis was supervised by none other than the brilliant American historian Richard Hofstadter (which makes Hofstadter what, exactly — a “grand-influence” on me? We may need a whole new vocabulary for this map). I can think of dozens of interesting questions one might productively ask if this data were available to help produce answers.
So I have two questions for the community at large. First of all, I would bet money that there is software out there that could be easily configured to run such a map, something people could easily visit and update — something wikified, but still robust. Maybe existing genealogy software that could be modified for this purpose? I don’t know and haven’t done any digging, but I wanted to throw the question out there and see what tools people might recommend.
Second, I want to keep this simple, so I am thinking of only asking people maybe three things: who was your PhD adviser, which institution granted your PhD, and (to capture “grand-influences” and other such people) which 2-3 contemporaries other than your formal adviser would you cite as important intellectual influences. [The phrasing of that last one is a little awkward, but what I mean is “don’t mention classic or canonical authors, mention people who were actually productive during your lifetime but are members of a previous academic generation.” For example, using myself: my PhD adviser was Ira Katznelson, my PhD is from Columbia, other contemporary influences would have to be Charles Tilly, Hayward Alker, and John Shotter. What that says about me I am not entirely sure, but the first step in finding out what it says is probably to get a more comprehensive database assembled.] If there is a good case to be made for collecting other bits of information, please make it, but please keep in mind that I want this to be a simple and nonthreatening process of data collection so I do not want to overload people.
The floor is open. I would be very happy to discover that this has already been done, but barring that, I would love input on what tool to use in producing this map — a map that I would of course want to be publicly searchable and collectively editable.
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson is Professor of International Studies in the School of International Service, and also Director of the AU Honors program. He previously taught at Columbia University and New York University. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University in 2001. In 2003-4, he served as President of the International Studies Association-Northeast; in 2012-2013, he did so again. He was formerly Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Relations and Development, and is currently Series Editor of the University of Michigan Press' book series Configurations: Critical Studies of World Politics. He was named the 2012 U.S. Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Jackson's research interests include culture and agency, international relations theory (particularly the intersection of realism and constructivism), scientific methodology, the role of rhetoric in public life, civilizations in world politics, the sociology of academic knowledge, popular culture and IR, and the formation of subjectivity both in the classroom and in the broader social sphere. Jackson is also a devoted (some might say “obsessive”) baseball fan, and a self-proclaimed sci-fi geek.
The project sounds interesting. Of course, you might also get this sort of information from Proquest — they have a dissertation and thesis database with access to digitized copies and a lot of libraries have access to it. You can search by advisor, but can’t easily get the overarching look that you’re seeking. Since they have this capability, they probably have a database for all of these fields that you could examine relationally. The other problem is how far back it goes, which may be problematic depending on your scope.
I did look at Proquest, and as you say, it can’t give that overarching view I am really after. As for scope: IR is not that old and there aren’t that many of us, so I want to aim high: I want a map of everyone in the field ever. Then we can aim at that and inevitably fall short ;-)
I just threw it out there because someplace in Proquest they have much of the info that you’re looking for, you just have to rearch the data person who has the keys. I have no idea how to do that or even whether they would have any interest in letting you have that sort of access.
Oh, it’s definitely a good idea. Might be worth looking into using Proquest to check the crowsourced self-reported data, too, and maybe fill in some of the holes.
This is fun to play with:
https://academictree.org/
Not as visually nice as I might wish though.
Agreed. I wonder what they run academia.edu off of, since that’s considerably better visually.
I’ve entered some family data at a couple of the genealogy websites. They are fairly easy to use and I’m guessing someone could adapt them to your purpose without too much trouble. They seem to report information in a standard format because I ended up exporting my data from one website using a particular file type and importing it into another website when it was clear that the latter better served my purposes.
Rather than a tree, another potential way to incorporate and visualize this information would be via an on-line encylopedia — kind of like an IR version of baseball-reference.com. Every indidual entry would include spaces for a few key pieces of information and it could be linked to different means of viewing the data. For example, individual advisors could be linked to data pages listing all of that person’s advisees. Likewise, institution(s), degree year, birth year, etc. could link to pages with lists of people with those facts in common.
Eventually, the data pages could even include “stat lines” of a sort — prominent publications complete with Google Scholar hotlinks.
That’s a great idea. Any clue about the software that might run something like that? In particular, how one might link to different ways of viewing the data?
I have thought a bunch about my “academic grandparents” (neither of whom I have gotten to know well). My academic “parents” are Ann Tickner and Hayward Alker, making my academic “grandparents” Karl Deutsch and Bob Keohane. Contemporary influences? …Too many to list! Nick Onuf, certainly…Spike Peterson, Christine Sylvester, Jindy Pettman, Marysia Zalewski….
And that is exactly the kind of information I want to capture in a central, public database ;-)
Try this:
https://neurotree.org/neurotree/peopleinfo.php?pid=2430
Possible good visualization tool:
https://vis.stanford.edu/protovis/ex/dendrogram.html
I might be totally alone in perceiving this, but doesn’t this project have a little bit of a DAR-ish kind of flavor to it?
No, you’re not alone.
As you suggest, I can see the potential for such a database from a sociology of knowledge perspective, if one operates under the–not unreasonable–assumption that every supervisor leaves a particular (or unique) imprint on those that she supervises.
But there are a couple of potential problems. First, the importance of the supervisor is going to be context specific. In the US, Germany, and a few other places, academic lineage is a big deal (and sometimes a deal-breaker). In other parts of the world, the UK for example, it is far less important. Part of this could be to do with differences in how Ph.D. programs are run and/or differences in expectations about supervisory input and/or differences in how projects are developed? I’m not taking a normative stand that one way is necessarily preferable to the other. Rather, as convincing as Stanley Hoffman might have been way back when, my point is that the disciplinary norms and practices of IR are more diverse than what is common-place in the US.
The second problem is that raised in part by Emily regarding its ‘DAR-ishness’. The data compiled could further institutionalize the practice in some quarters of assessing the quality/potential of graduate students and early career scholars by their lineage as opposed to their actual skills and accomplishments. This isn’t necessarily a reason not to do it, but it would be really important to mitigate the data being used as an acceptable short-hand for individual quality.
I had fantasic and inspiring supervisors but as an early career academic, I would personally prefer to be evaluated by others on the (de)merits of my own work as opposed to that of my supervisors.