A Digital Reading of Twentieth-Century Demography

2014
ekmerchant.github.io/digdemog

This website began as a digital supplement to my dissertation, “Prediction and Control: Global Population, Population Science, and Population Politics in the Twentieth Century,” which I defended in 2015 as a requirement of the Ph.D. program in the Department of History at the University of Michigan.

While the dissertation examines the reciprocal influence between demography and population politics, programs, and policies in the twentieth century, this digital supplement focuses on the science of demography, offering a deeper analysis of the development of the field between 1920 and 1984 than I can give in the dissertation.

The website comprises three sections: the first, Population Association of America, examines the history of the PAA, the professional organization for population scientists working in the United States; the second, Topics in Population Science, employs topic modeling to provide a distant (algorithmic) reading of three population-oriented journals established in the twentieth century; the third, Networks in Population Science, employs network diagrams to map relationships between scientists and their publications in the field of demography.