For this genealogy of feminist media studies, we attempted to develop a visualization that illustrates ties between people, institutions, and fields of study central to our discipline. Each step of developing this genealogy—such as formulating survey questions, setting up the survey, collecting the data, “cleaning up” the data, choosing a metaphor, a technology, and a design for the visualization, and modifying the result—created different opportunities for different kinds of feminist interventions. The contribution here is in thinking of a genealogy as a set of relations among people, fields of study, and institutions, visually communicating how the data was collected and appropriating a flow diagram as a social network analysis.
This is not an academic genealogy in the traditional sense, which usually shows mentoring relationships across generations as an academic lineage or an academic ancestry, such as the Mathematics Genealogy Project or the Academic Family Tree project. Instead, we wanted to...
University of California Press