7. Long-distance Relationships?: Quantifying Intellectual Distance Between University Departments and Interdisciplinary Programs

• In Event: 408 - Visual Media Poster Presentation

Abstract

How closely related are different fields of human knowledge? How can we measure the boundaries between disciplines? Overlaps between academic disciplines have been studied in many different ways; one of the most common approaches is bibliometrics, which uses citations to show connections across topics. Here I take an organizational approach, using the structure of organizations to show their ideological links.
I use data on university departments and programs to measure overlaps between traditional fields of human knowledge and changes in these overlaps over time. I employ network visualization to illuminate relationships between intellectual fields. I also develop a novel quantitative measure of relatedness between concepts: intellectual distance measures the similarity between two field, measured by their relative frequency of overlap. Changes in these institutionalized intellectual alliances reveal shifts in how people and organizations perceive similarities and differences between fields of knowledge. While a change in a single university may reveal idiosyncratic political or social fission or fusion, widespread shifts in universities across the U.S. likely reflect a more fundamental shift in how actors conceive of knowledge. I then use this measure to investigate change and stability in the American research university from 1980-2010 as a case study example of the use of the intellectual distance metric.

Author

• Molly M. King, Stanford University