Visualizing Art Education Scholars: Antecedents, Lineages, and Pedagogical Places

Supplementary material for this article can be found online at http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/var/media/43.1/sutters/index.html.

Situating the Study

I have long been intrigued by how other art education scholars arrived at their current place in the field. This curiosity materialized during the Penn State Symposium in May of 2016 wherein scholars revisited the famed “Big Red Book” (Mattil, 1965) and the ramifications in the field of art education thereafter. It was encouraging and enlightening to hear firsthand accounts of those formative sessions and how the influence of particular scholars could be tracked through the academic lineage of succeeding generations. It affirmed an experience at a conference a few months prior where a cadre of scholars in our field were reflecting on the professors we studied with and how our own genealogies were so interrelated. It was also at this conference where I presented research with the Data Visualization Working Group and was contemplating how a networked representation of our genealogy could be constructed and maintained through available technologies. How could the academic lineage of our field be presented where participants could not only see where they are situated within the genealogy, but also engage in networked discourse that could potentially shape our collective trajectory?

Contemporary Scholarship

In his editorial in Studies in Art Education, Doug Blandy (2008) calls for scholars to engage in lineage projects that take into consideration the “antecedents or the larger history of the field” (p. 4). Fearful that my line of inquiry could be clouded by what Hafeli (2009) refers to as “scholarly oblivion,” I was cognizant to approach the research in a manner that could eventually actualize Blandy’s petition while taking into consideration what has, or has not, transpired before.

I have sensed, as have others, a desire to look intently at our history through digital approaches. Clayton Funk and Juan Carlos Castro (2013) presented findings from their funded research that makes visible trends in our field through textual analysis of the conference program. Chris Grodoski, Libba Wilcox, and Samantha Gross visualized historic networks in the first decade of Studies in Art Education and have generated complex visual networks linking pioneering texts in our field to ensuing scholarship (2017). Scholars in our field are exploring ways of making sense of data through visualization (Klein, 2014) and through questioning how the proliferation of software can serve as a methodological approach to accessing and utilizing big data (Knochel & Patton, 2014).

Significance of the Study

The focus of my current research is to augment these current lines of inquiry by focusing on how scholars in our field are interrelated primarily through where and whom they studied with during their doctoral program. The purpose is to see how a networked ontology can be made visible through digital modalities, from conception of the study to dissemination of outcomes. Enacting a mixed-methods approach, the study relies on surveys to collect and organize the data and employs various Open-Source Software (OSS) programs to visually represent the findings. This short manuscript and related website merely present current findings to both elicit feedback and encourage additional participation in the survey. Once sample saturation is achieved, an exha

Visualizing the Data

The latest iteration of the website can be accessed at https://art-genealogy-justin-sutters.herokuapp.com/. Due to the short format of this publication as well as the desired sample¹ of the survey, detailed analyses will not be provided in this paper. Rather, each visualization on the website is followed by contextual information as well as technological and didactic content. The site will be updated periodically as participant responses are received.

A variety of software programs were employed to create the images in addition to the functionalities provided by Survey Monkey (http://www.surveymonkey.com/), which generated the pie charts and bar graphs. Tableau Public (https://public.tableau.com/s/) allows for multiple formats such as the bubble and line charts, all of which become interactive by dragging the cursor across the field to provide additional information about the data. Wordle (http://www...