Textual Analysis of Graphic Design Program Descriptions

An experiment of applying Digital Humanities method to program descriptions of graphic design programs in the US

Our century has witnessed an on-going growing need of designing for immaterial services. Programs emphasizing on the social relevance of design and design thinking
are emerging, such as Transdisciplinary Design at Parson, Design for Social Innovation at SVA. I wonder where the communication design, or graphic design,
are heading in this developing landscape of design practice. How do communication design programs address such new paradigm of design and expectation of expande skill sets from designers? How does BFA programs and MFA programs situate dierently? I explored these questions with the approach of distant reading at program descriptions and learning outcome.

How to Read
∙ The line represents the individual document, regardless of the length variation
∙ The relative position of a circle tell approximate point of occurrence of the word in the document
∙ Radius of the circle depicts the number of occurrences which aggregates at the line end

Process
∙ Take a few highly influential programs as a pilot
∙ Close read and identified a group of keywords speaking to various aspect emphasis of design
∙ Create individual text documents for different programs. When expanding the project to more schools, this step to data collection could be automated by web scrapping.
∙ Create corpus of multiple documents in a textal analysis software Volant Tools
∙ Enter one group of keywords a time and perform textual analysis with fuzzy search