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| Not pictured: The New World |
As AUC is in midst of celebrating its centennial this year, we thought it might be interesting to take a look at the diverse history of the student body. International Day has been a campus tradition for over thirty years, but since its founding in 1919 the students have come from a wide variety of backgrounds.
To help illustrate that, we created a simple map charting the nationalities of students from 1927 to 1950. This data is from the AUC Board of Trustees' Meeting Minutes.
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| Typical listing of students' "race": https://bit.ly/2WSIDnd |
Thankfully the OCR was quite good, and it was relatively simple to split data by commas and semicolons to create usable tables. Of course with any digital humanities project data cleanup is required; in this case there were sometimes divergent spellings of nationalities (e.g. "Iraquian", "Iraqian", "Iraqi", "Mesopotamian"). More challenging was the philosophical decisions about nationality and "race." AUC separated out modern-day Indonesians into Javanese and Sumatran, but should we combined them into one category? The complete list of terms (complete with what we would call misspellings) is below for those interested:
Of course, many of what we're mapping as "international" students were born in Egypt, such as the Greeks and Armenians. More thorough examination of students' homes could (and should) be undertaken using other resources in our digital library like the yearbooks and Caravan back issues. Indeed, many yearbooks listed nationality in the student entry.
The final table looked like this, with the latitude and longitude added to be able to map the data in QGIS. We decided to place the markers on the capital of each country since there was no systematized information about what students' hometowns were.
The date field used YYYY-MM-DD since that is required by the Time Manager plugin in QGIS, but it was only the year we were interested in. Downloading the table as a comma separated value (CSV) file made importing the data into QGIS quite simple and we got to see this lovely map of data:
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| Unweighted student count map, sadly the Argentine student was cut off |
QGIS allows straightforward tools to weigh data, but that led to a problem that was not easily solved. With Egyptian students in the table, the size of the markers by count was skewed to total meaninglessness, as you can see below:
In the interest of time, we decided to omit Egyptian students from the map, though this is likely something we'll revisit to improve our understanding of QGIS and see what is possible.
After using the Time Manager plugin, we were able to create the animation you see at the top of the post. As mostly newcomers to digital humanities and mapping, it was an enjoyable and educational experience to play around with our data to create something that tells a story and improve technical understanding of QGIS. However, would researchers find this map any more useful than a line chart or table? This weighing of effort vs. value seems to come up with most of the mapping projects I have looked at; while interesting they may not say something a nice spreadsheet couldn't.
The data is available in our institutional repository, and please don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions about either the technical side of the project or AUC history.
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