Panoptic geographies: an examination of all U.S. geographic dissertations

The essence of contemporary geography--its disciplinary DNA--is bound up in its connections to the past: rich branches of a growing family tree of Ph.D.s, advisors, and institutional homes. Many trace how we arrived at the current state of our discipline. These histories describe shifting paradigms (James and Martin, 1993), subfields (Gaile and Wilmott 2003), or geography's "key thinkers" and their representation of, and influence on, the discipline as it changed over time (Johnston and Sidaway, 2004). Recounting of core geographical debates and profiles of prominent geographers can be quite useful. But at the same time, it is an elite exercise in which changes in geography are examined from the standpoint of its most outstanding participants. Characterizing the trends in geography from the bottom up--witnessing the interests of the emergent junior cadre of geographers--is an equally if not more valuable endeavor. In this paper we expand current understandings of the institutional and disciplinary nature of geography, and its change over time by examining the over 10,000 dissertations produced during the 120+ years that geography has been a doctoral-level discipline in the United States. A digital humanities approach to the history of the discipline allows us to examine this large database of Ph.D. production. We argue that dissertations offer a broad view of the field, which allow us to track the overall output of geographical scholarship by university, take into account the different eras of geography based on dissertation topics, chart the rise and fall of important key terms, and examine the changing locational interests of geographic scholarship. In their aggregation, doctoral dissertations represent trends in geography as long as it has been a distinct academic field of study in the United States. THE DISSERTATION AS A BIBLIOMETRIC TOOL IN CHARTING GEOGRAPHY'S PROGRESS While grand narratives of geography are frequently qualitative and anecdotal, there are also numerous quantitative, but narrower, assessments of the field. Scholars have scanned the number of publications, grants, and other tangible products of the research faculty (Groop and Schaetzl 1997; Morill 1980; Koelsch 1981). Billie Lee Turner and William Meyer (1985) compared the level of citation indices at major departments of geography. There has also been a look at the degree to which graduate programs in geography are successful in student placements (Liu and Zhan 2012). Other disciplinary research includes investigations of courses offered, undergraduate enrollment, and degrees conferred (Murphy 2007). Beyond these in-discipline evaluations, the National Academy of Science regularly assesses doctoral programs based on a variety of metrics and multivariate regression methodologies (Ostriker and others 2010). These provide the metrics used by deans and provosts to justify hiring decisions or rationalize the downsizing of geography programs. Another angle is observing how geographers fit into a larger body of knowledge. Andrew Bodman's (1986, 1991) studies employed citations to determine the disproportionate influence of a relatively small percentage of academic geographers and also demonstrated that while human geography imports a great deal of material from other social science disciplines, it exports very little. Neil Wrigley and Stephen Matthews (1986) also examine citations, identifying "classic" books and articles in the field based. Jamie Foster and coauthors (2007) later revealed the influence of economic geographers through citations in nongeography journals. Other studies depict how the discipline of geography itself is taught. Textbooks and course syllabi are analyzed to delineate different "fashions" within physical geography (Jennings 2006), the current state of the discipline (Baylina and Pratts 2003), how regions of the world are addressed and perceived (Martis 2005; Bagoly-Simo 2013; Rees and Legates 2013), and the treatment of women's achievements in the field (Mayer 1989). …