2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

What does it mean to belong in engineering? Who belongs in engineering? Where do libraries fit into this conversation? Many scholars have explored the concept of outreach, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging in these spaces. This project examines these questions and more by using a library of literature as a corpus for analysis. By moving beyond the standard literature review, the authors are able to examine the content of published material using textual analysis to look for high level connections and concepts not always apparent through initial reads.

At the heart of this work is a collection of published scholarship on belonging in STEM, with analysis of sources on Engineering. This library was created in Zotero, an open-source citation manager, and is available as a public group library for others to use. It was initially intended to support a literature review for future research projects, but it is itself useful as we seek to understand how other scholars consider belonging in their work.

Voyant Tools is an open-source tool with the code available through GitHub. It is often used in the digital humanities, but it can be a useful tool for any STEM librarian looking to understand a corpus. Through the creation of this library, the authors are able to input all text across each library entry into this tool. They could then read and analyze each entry individually, or as a group. Various visual outputs, such as bubblelines and cirrus, allow the user to see the frequency of terms across the corpus, identify themes, and make connections across the larger body of work. Other tools within Voyant Tools include the creation of topics and proximity searching.

Through this paper and poster, the authors share how using open source tools, such as Zotero and Voyant Tools, can create a user-friendly, shareable corpus for analysis. The combination of these tools should present a novel method for any STEM librarian looking to expand their own analysis skills. The corpus created in Zotero will also serve a starting point for STEM librarians looking to begin their own library curated on belonging.