Exploring the Use of ‘Acknowledgement Analysis’ to Map Intellectual Diversity and Cross-disciplinary Activity Within the iSchools

Fostering intellectual diversity in the iSchools is a critical task and central to the unique iSchool vision. However, beyond recent efforts to track hiring patterns and figure out the representation of various disciplines within the iSchool community, there is currently a lack of empirical research about crossdisciplinary activity within iSchool faculties. In this research note, which seeks to build on and complicate a recent paper by Wiggins and Sawyer (2012), we foreground the various zones and activities that make up everyday iSchool life instead of discussing the iSchool as a coherent unit. Specifically, we examine faculty involvement with the dissertation production process as a potentially key zone of cross-disciplinary faculty contact and exchange. We also explore the use of “acknowledgement analysis,” a relatively unexplored method for studying academic social networks. Our findings, based on analyzing the acknowledgements of every dissertation published in 2010 (N=78) by a sample of 15 research-intensive iSchools, suggest that the dissertation production process is a site of cross-disciplinary activity but not evenly so across the various disciplines populating the iSchools. Some discipline areas within the iSchools engage in cross-disciplinary exchange more frequently than others and with a more diverse array of intellectual interlocutors.