Infographic by Prerna Srigyan
Prerna Srigyan, "S&TS: Disciplinary diversity of contributors ", contributed by Prerna Srigyan, STS Infrastructures, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 18 August 2018, accessed 24 August 2024. https://stsinfrastructures.org/content/sts-disciplinary-diversity-contributors
Critical Commentary
This bar graph represents the disciplinary distribution of contributors to Science & Technology Studies. Assigning disciplines for contributors to a journal as interdisciplinary as STS raises many questions, especially if performed by methods other than asking contributors to identify their disciplines, if possible. Since time and other factors (a few authors have died, moved out of academia, or could not be found online) did not permit us to take that route, disciplines were identified based on following criteria: (i) keywords mentioned by authors in their online profiles that revealed disicplinary orientations (ii) departments contributors taught or researched in (iii) disciplines in which authors have their PhDs.
After this process, 137 different combinations of disciplines arose out of 615 contributors. These 137 disciplinary combinations were then further categorised under 23 disciplines, which map the breadth of not only social sciences and humanities, but also natural and applied sciences.
Even though this process has considerable subjectivity, the goal was to arrive at patterns that could potentially indicate which disciplines have contributed most to the journal. Most contributions have come from "STS" itself (173), followed by Sociology (148), Philosophy (46), and Anthropology (36). Out of 615 authors, disicplinary orientations of 54 could not be gleaned through this process.