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. By crowdsourcing disciplinary self-study and trusting site members to curate the archive, the WST encourages users to see themselves not just as individuals, but rather as members of an evolving network of scholars who contribute to the collective project of knowledge making within the field.
