Group 3: Anshika, Anna, Liv, Veronika, Essy
Introduction to Digital Humanities
1 Aug 2023
Analysis and Interpretation
Research Questions and Resolutions
Our initial research questions targeted the accessibility and equity involved in promoting women’s higher education. By looking at our home institutions we were able to conclude that several different approaches were used by liberal arts colleges. The factor that ties our schools together is that these schools’ solutions to an equitable and comprehensive American higher education were becoming co-ed. One of our original questions asked about affordability of schools between rural and urban areas. As we continued our research, we did not end up answering that question and instead focused on the intersection of co-ed schools and race as they pertain to different size schools. How might these two marginalized identities, women and people of color, be represented in today’s college system?
Answers to the larger question we posed of why our institutions made changes to gender inclusivity when they did were inconclusive, as we faced limitations in the data available to us from the institutions.
Evidence and Further Research
We found that although fewer all-women’s colleges exist in 2021 than they did in 1968, women makeup on average more than 50% of college populations. This statistic holds true throughout different sized colleges as well. Comparatively, white students make up the largest percentage of college students. Interestingly, the racial makeup of a school does change based on school size when gender does not. For example, black and hispanic students are more represented in schools with less than 1,000 students than they are in any other size college. All of these statistics were helpfully visualized using Digital Humanities methods. Although we did not use Voyant – instead we used Raw Graphs and ArcGis – we learned through DH lessons how visualizing our data helps us create tangible means of data intake.
Through this project, we were hoping to explore the context behind the individual circumstances of our respective institutions regarding their decision to foster co-ed environments. Unfortunately, we faced challenges to our research due to a scarcity of information in the collegiate archives. This presented as a challenge because it was difficult to draw satisfying conclusions from the inconsistent research we were finding in the navigation process.
Methods and Theories
We agreed it was critical to base the methods of our research on theories that are conducive to maintaining mindfulness of the power that the framing of our research has on the information we produce. We chose to look at Tim Sherratt’s work in The real face of White Australia for inspiration: Sherratt develops technology that uses physical cues to identify faces of Australians from historical archives that were not white. As a result, it is possible that mixed-race individuals or non-white individuals who are white passing did not fit the criteria that the AI technology was equipped to identify. This is an issue we identified in our own research, as we are producing data that is directly guided by social constructions: gender and race. In many frameworks, such as the American census, groups of people can be excluded or misrepresented by their legal race or gender.
Consequently, we decided it was important that we were intentional with the labels we used to reference gender and race (such as the ones specified in the table below) so as to produce data that was as inclusive and accurate as possible. Additionally, because gender 2 is the focus of our project, and the institutions we are representing were originally developed using a gender binary framework, it was important we did not perpetuate this incorrect and dated model in the presentation of our current research.
Social Justice Inquiry
Most of the liberal arts universities, especially the ones represented in our group, are private universities. Access to private universities and education is a social justice question in general, but our project looks specifically into women’s access to education. While we acknowledge the general trends in women’s access to education throughout the years, our project pays particular attention to co-education history and the history of all-women colleges. We address all 4 domains of power that are outlined in the matrix of domination (D’Ignazio, Klein 2020): structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal. For structural, we analyze the laws and policies that historically prevented women from accessing education and how they impacted the data in the long run. The disciplinary domain in our project is more universities-specific – how and when they became co-ed (or didn’t). The individual one is based on our group’s personal experience and knowledge of our campuses. As for the hegemonic domain, we look into the way co-education was perceived by the public, alumni, and administration of universities with a focus on the colleges our group members study at.
