Author: Ben Miller

Benjamin Miller is a PhD candidate at The Graduate Center, CUNY, where his dissertation analyzes metadata from roughly 3,000 rhetoric and composition dissertations, 2001-2010. For more about Ben, his projects, and the occasional essay, visit http://majoringinmeta.net.

by Benjamin Miller, Amanda Licastro, and Jill Belli We are the principal designers of the Writing Studies Tree (WST), a project we hope you’ve heard about since our launch at the 2012 CCCC in St. Louis. Briefly, the WST is an open-access site for gathering, visualizing, and analyzing “academic genealogies”: the often-invisible systems of affiliation and influence formed as individuals write dissertations, train as teachers, and study and research together throughout their careers. We had seen many of these “family” reunions at conferences, at which junior and senior faculty from across the globe turn into grinning alumni of (e.g.)…

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