TY - JOUR

T1 - Diversifying history

T2 - A large-scale analysis of changes in researcher demographics and scholarly agendas

AU - Risi, Stephan

AU - Nielsen, Mathias W.

AU - Kerr, Emma

AU - Brady, Emer

AU - Kim, Lanu

AU - McFarland, Daniel A.

AU - Jurafsky, Dan

AU - Zou, James

AU - Schiebinger, Londa

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2022 Risi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

PY - 2022

Y1 - 2022

N2 - Background In recent years, interest has grown in whether and to what extent demographic diversity sparks discovery and innovation in research. At the same time, topic modeling has been employed to discover differences in what women and men write about. This study engages these two strands of scholarship to explore associations between changing researcher demographics and research questions asked in the discipline of history. Specifically, we analyze developments in history as women entered the field. Methods We focus on author gender in diachronic analysis of history dissertations from 1980 (when online data is first available) to 2015 and a select set of general history journals from 1950 to 2015. We use correlated topic modeling and network visualizations to map developments in research agendas over time and to examine how women and men have contributed to these developments. Results Our summary snapshot of aggregate interests of women and men for the period 1950 to 2015 identifies new topics associated with women authors: gender and women’s history, body history, family and households, consumption and consumerism, and sexuality. Diachronic analysis demonstrates that while women pioneered topics such as gender and women’s history or the history of sexuality, these topics broaden over time to become methodological frameworks that historians widely embraced and that changed in interesting ways as men engaged with them. Our analysis of history dissertations surface correlations between advisor/advisee gender pairings and choice of dissertation topic. Conclusions Overall, this quantitative longitudinal study suggests that the growth in women historians has coincided with the broadening of research agendas and an increased sensitivity to new topics and methodologies in the field.

AB - Background In recent years, interest has grown in whether and to what extent demographic diversity sparks discovery and innovation in research. At the same time, topic modeling has been employed to discover differences in what women and men write about. This study engages these two strands of scholarship to explore associations between changing researcher demographics and research questions asked in the discipline of history. Specifically, we analyze developments in history as women entered the field. Methods We focus on author gender in diachronic analysis of history dissertations from 1980 (when online data is first available) to 2015 and a select set of general history journals from 1950 to 2015. We use correlated topic modeling and network visualizations to map developments in research agendas over time and to examine how women and men have contributed to these developments. Results Our summary snapshot of aggregate interests of women and men for the period 1950 to 2015 identifies new topics associated with women authors: gender and women’s history, body history, family and households, consumption and consumerism, and sexuality. Diachronic analysis demonstrates that while women pioneered topics such as gender and women’s history or the history of sexuality, these topics broaden over time to become methodological frameworks that historians widely embraced and that changed in interesting ways as men engaged with them. Our analysis of history dissertations surface correlations between advisor/advisee gender pairings and choice of dissertation topic. Conclusions Overall, this quantitative longitudinal study suggests that the growth in women historians has coincided with the broadening of research agendas and an increased sensitivity to new topics and methodologies in the field.

U2 - 10.1371/journal.pone.0262027

DO - 10.1371/journal.pone.0262027

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 35045091

AN - SCOPUS:85123195367

VL - 17

JO - PLoS ONE

JF - PLoS ONE

SN - 1932-6203

IS - 1

M1 - e0262027

ER -