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Board 102: Crafting a Library on Belonging in Engineering: An Initial Review Using Textual Analysis

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Conference

2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Portland, Oregon

Publication Date

June 23, 2024

Start Date

June 23, 2024

End Date

July 12, 2024

Conference Session

Engineering Libraries Division (ELD) Poster Session

Tagged Division

Engineering Libraries Division (ELD)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

11

Permanent URL

https://strategy.asee.org/46658

Download Count

1

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Paper Authors

biography

Denise Amanda Wetzel Pennsylvania State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-5332-2287

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Denise A. Wetzel (she/her) is a Science & Engineering Librarian at Pennsylvania State University Libraries. She is also the Patent and Trademark Resource Center Librarian for the University Park PTRC. She holds a MLIS from the University of Alabama and a Masters in Oceanography from Florida State University. Before joining PSU, Denise worked for Florida State University Libraries, Mississippi State University Libraries, and as a teacher.

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biography

Sara C. Kern Pennsylvania State University

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Sara Kern is an Engineering Librarian at Penn State University. She earned her MA in history from Penn State and her MSLIS at Syracuse University. Her research interests include inclusive library outreach and instruction.

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Abstract

What does it mean to belong in engineering? Who belongs in engineering? Where do libraries fit into this conversation? Many scholars have explored the concept of outreach, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging in these spaces. This project examines these questions and more by using a library of literature as a corpus for analysis. By moving beyond the standard literature review, the authors are able to examine the content of published material using textual analysis to look for high level connections and concepts not always apparent through initial reads.

At the heart of this work is a collection of published scholarship on belonging in STEM, with analysis of sources on Engineering. This library was created in Zotero, an open-source citation manager, and is available as a public group library for others to use. It was initially intended to support a literature review for future research projects, but it is itself useful as we seek to understand how other scholars consider belonging in their work.

Voyant Tools is an open-source tool with the code available through GitHub. It is often used in the digital humanities, but it can be a useful tool for any STEM librarian looking to understand a corpus. Through the creation of this library, the authors are able to input all text across each library entry into this tool. They could then read and analyze each entry individually, or as a group. Various visual outputs, such as bubblelines and cirrus, allow the user to see the frequency of terms across the corpus, identify themes, and make connections across the larger body of work. Other tools within Voyant Tools include the creation of topics and proximity searching.

Through this paper and poster, the authors share how using open source tools, such as Zotero and Voyant Tools, can create a user-friendly, shareable corpus for analysis. The combination of these tools should present a novel method for any STEM librarian looking to expand their own analysis skills. The corpus created in Zotero will also serve a starting point for STEM librarians looking to begin their own library curated on belonging.

Wetzel, D. A., & Kern, S. C. (2024, June), Board 102: Crafting a Library on Belonging in Engineering: An Initial Review Using Textual Analysis Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://strategy.asee.org/46658

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2024 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015