Collecting Diachronic Affiliation Datafor Faculty at HBCUs Using Memento

Abstract

ABSTRACTAcademic mobility has accelerated in part due to recent civil rights movements and higher levels of social mobility. This trend increases the threat of brain drain from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), which already face significant logistical challenges despite broad success in the advancement of Black professionals. We aim to examine this threat from a Science of Science perspective by collecting diachronic data for a large‐scale longitudinal analysis of HBCU faculty’s academic mobility. Our study uses Memento, manual collection, and web scraping to aggregate historical identifiers (URI‐Ms) of webpages from 35 HBCUs across multiple web archives. We are thus able to extend the use of “canonicalization” to associate past versions of webpages that resided at different URIs with their current URI allowing for a more accurate view of the pages over time. In this paper we define and execute a novel data collection method which is essential for our examination of HBCU human capital changes and supports a movement towards a more equitable academic workforce.