Locative Metadata II

/ Derek Mueller
⏳ Approximate reading time: 2 mins

I mentioned the other day that I had more maps to share.
I put together another batch built from program-level locative metadata rather
than the field-wide or disciplinary locations shown in the maps of CCCC chairs’
addresses/conventions since 1977 and the institutional membership of the rhet-comp
doctoral consortium. Below I’ve worked from the CCR web site to come up
with simple geographic representations of various features of the program where
I’m doing graduate work: I. Where our faculty come from; II. Where our graduate
students come from (MA institutions); and III. Where our alumni have gone.
The fourth and final map in this batch rolls these three data-sets together,
mashing them into a single map that shows multiple location-associations for the
program. For now I’ll hold off on making the argument that such slices of
locative metadata are significant beyond the usual ways we have both for
understanding a graduate program from the inside (who do we understand ourselves
to be?) and from the outside (what image do we project?). Of course, these
aren’t the only questions for which the maps have relevance, and though they’re
a starting place, perhaps they seem too simple (or unanswerable given
complex variables) to bother asking.

Map I. Faculty. Green dots indicate graduate faculty alma maters.

Map II. Students. Red dots indicate graduate student MA alma maters. Multiple rings (bullseyes) refer to 1+ students.

Map III. Alumni. Orange dots mark institutions where alumni now hold faculty appointments.

It runs the risk of junking up the display, but I’ve added arcs between SU
and the respective institutions. I haven’t decided whether the arc feature
adds much to the map. I’m still experimenting with features and seeing what comes of it. The fourth and final map, then, appears below. It
combines all of the points shown in the first three. And I’ve dropped the
arcs because they make for a tangle of untraceable ties between points.

Map IV. Combined.

All of the locative data is available on our web site, so I’m not working
with information that was difficult to gather. The locations of alumni
reflects only current institutions, not programs where graduates worked previously (although such a thing would be interesting to consider, too).
Also, the locative data at the program level, like the field-wide maps I posted
a few days ago, corresponds exclusively to the grid coordinates of other institutions.
From this, whether or not we can resolve it to anyone’s lasting satisfaction, we
can begin to ask about how such formations constitute networks of some sort, even if we know only tacitly that they do.