Inspired by David Kriesel’s talk “Spiegel-Mining”, a friend of mine and a professor from the Hochschule Magdeburg scraped a German website that regularly publishes reviews of social work literature and mined the resulting 18.000 articles, hoping for interesting insights.
In an attempt to visualize the discourse, we created several topic maps, like the one below, which you can find on the accompanying (German) website. The colors represent the gender of the authors of the review. Note that we are not entirely sure if the editors or the authors are responsible for this gender assignment. Also, the explicit gender assignment was removed and can not be found on the scraped website anymore.
Section of the concept web, visualized with Gephi
The findings were not surprising: people whom the website identified as women tend to write reviews on topics one could consider traditional female-dominated fields, like child care.