Maxim Romanov

Notes ·

The Network of MESA (2009–2017)

A Network of MESA Annual Meetings (2009–2017)

The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Although it is not as large as such associations as AAR and AHA, it is very dear to most of us who are engaged in the study of Middle East. Those who attended the annual meeting in Boston must have seen an attempt to visualize academic genealogies of scholars of Middle East, which sounds like a very interesting idea, but will take forever to realize. At the moment the genealogy looks like unconnected snowflakes (here is Franz Rosenthal's snowflake of students),1 but we all realize that the real life is way more complicated and more interesting than that (Perhaps, MESA should add another field to academic profiles, where we’d need to provide the name of our adviser(s?!)—or, better, the entire dissertation committee—then we will be able to recreate a living genealogy of the field with all its complexities and subtleties).

While the genealogy project is too far away from its maturity, we do have some other interesting data through which we can get a glimpse into the academic community that grew around MESA: we can use programs of annual meetings--in combination with academic profiles of MESA members (and, perhaps later, abstracts of their papers)--to gauge whether and how we are connected with each other across the field, how we form collegial communities and maintain them, and how these communities take new shapes in reaction to internal developments in the academy and to external political and social factors. The program data is limited in many ways, as it does not capture such connections as who attends panels, who engages into discussions with panelists, nor does it anywhere close to revealing who we hang out with between panels at the most attended areas of the conference. Additionally, only a limited number of programs is relatively accessible at the moment and our insight can go back in time only 8 years (2009--2017; all data used below is openly available at the official MESA Website).

Below you can find explanations of how the network was generated as well as summaries for each major intellectual community that can be identified in the data. You can also browse the network and find yourself there.

The Network of MESA Panels (2009-2017). The dynamic and searchable network is available here.

On data and method

The data has been collected from the official MESA website—only what is openly accessible has been included into the dataset (in other words, if you chose not to make your profile public, your data is not in the dataset). The data has been downloaded with wget and then reformatted with a series of scripts written in python. The data was then reformatted into a network model where scholars are connected through all the panels and sessions they participated in together. The weight is based on the number co-panelists. Scholars with multiple roles (such as an Organizer and a Presenter) were given more weight, to stress their active engagement. The network visualization has been built with Gephi, whose community detection algorithm was used to identify closely connected groups of scholars, orintellectual communities; the results were saved into an interactive network using Sigma.js plugin. Reports were then algorithmically generated for all major intellectual communities (with the size of at least 1%) using R, R Markdown, and the knitr package. Some data cleaning—mainly to unify different spellings—was done with OpenRefine.

What’s in community reports?

As stated above, communities were identified with the community detection algorithm in Gephi. Reports summarize formal descriptions that MESA members provide in their open academic profiles at the MESA website (disciplines, subfields, geographical areas of specialization, working languages, and degree granting institutions). Some members preferred not to share their profiles online, so their data was not included. In general, the most salient characteristics of communities offer a decent idea of what a given community is about. For example, Group 12 appears to be mostly about politics in modern Middle East; Group 15—mostly about premodern Islamic history and Islamic studies; Group 1—mostly about Ottoman studies, and so on.

Interestingly, there are multiple communities with the same—or, at least, comparable—thematic/subject foci, but they differ by alma maters, which shows that the formation of academic communities is tied to brick-and-mortar institutions (For example, Group 1 and Group 24 both appear to focus on Ottoman studies, but most of the scholars from the first group have degrees from American institutions, while the second one is dominated by scholars with degrees from Turkish institutions.

The networks of specific scholars often cross into multiple communities.

The most salient features of each community are statistical outliers on the high end of data distribution: i.e., items whose frequencies are higher than Q3 * 1.5 (items with frequency 1 were removed before determining quartiles).

Reports are organized by the size of communities (from largest to smallest).

Community reports

Group 12 (397 members)

The community has 397 members (7.73%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 15 (342 members)

The community has 341 members (6.639%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 1 (339 members)

The community has 338 members (6.581%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 8 (330 members)

The community has 328 members (6.386%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 10 (211 members)

The community has 210 members (4.089%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 9 (206 members)

The community has 206 members (4.011%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 11 (201 members)

The community has 201 members (3.914%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 24 (197 members)

The community has 196 members (3.816%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 31 (181 members)

The community has 180 members (3.505%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 4 (177 members)

The community has 177 members (3.446%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 2 (173 members)

The community has 173 members (3.368%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 6 (167 members)

The community has 167 members (3.252%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 5 (154 members)

The community has 154 members (2.998%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 20 (151 members)

The community has 151 members (2.94%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 27 (149 members)

The community has 149 members (2.901%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 22 (142 members)

The community has 141 members (2.745%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 3 (140 members)

The community has 140 members (2.726%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 16 (133 members)

The community has 133 members (2.59%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 13 (127 members)

The community has 127 members (2.473%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 17 (124 members)

The community has 124 members (2.414%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 7 (123 members)

The community has 123 members (2.395%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 23 (113 members)

The community has 113 members (2.2%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 14 (109 members)

The community has 109 members (2.122%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 30 (109 members)

The community has 109 members (2.122%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 19 (105 members)

The community has 105 members (2.044%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 28 (100 members)

The community has 100 members (1.947%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 32 (98 members)

The community has 98 members (1.908%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 21 (87 members)

The community has 87 members (1.694%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 25 (73 members)

The community has 72 members (1.402%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 26 (68 members)

The community has 68 members (1.324%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 29 (62 members)

The community has 62 members (1.207%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

Group 18 (57 members)

The community has 57 members (1.11%). The most salient features of the community are as follows:

  1. Photo by Robin Dougherty, source: www.facebook.com. ↩

Middle East StudiesMESAAcademic Communities