We want to be the "Missing Manual" for digital research collections. While the use of databases such as ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers or Gales’ Nineteenth Century Collections Online is common, these tools have largely escaped critique by traditional humanities scholars. Knowledge of the way proprietary databases work is limited because their structures and content are opaque. As a result, scholars may not be able to discover the provenance of documents or to understand why certain search results are returned.
The Writing Studies Tree (writingstudiestree.org) – an online, open-access, interactive database of individual scholars, educational institutions, and the disciplinary movements that connect them – offers an “academic genealogy” for the field of writing studies that serves as a model for visualizing the social history of humanities disciplines. Through a fixed data structure that gives open editing privileges to thousands of members, the site aggregates collective visualizations of the field, presenting its history anew and enabling scholars to identify patterns and movements in new ways.