The data contained within the following illustration represents the most common words found in the titles of more than 150 doctoral theses in the humanities and social sciences published in 2010. These titles were culled from the publications of four Boston-area universities: MIT, Harvard, Boston College, and Boston University. The illustration was made using Wordle, a free word-cloud generator. The size of each word is directly proportional to the number of times it appeared within the data sample.
Assuming it took each graduate student an average of five years to complete her dissertation, the cloud represents 375 years, 273,750 days, or 6,574,357 hours of scholarship.
JESUS H. CHRIST: DISSERTATIONS ABOUT THE SON OF GOD» Miraculous Mundane: The True Jesus Church and Chinese Christianity in the 20th Century(Melissa Wei-Tsing Inouye, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard)
» Walking Where Jesus Walked: American Christian Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Post-war Period (Hillary Kaell, Graduate Program in the History of American Civilization at Harvard)
THE CHOSEN: DISSERTATIONS ABOUT JEWS
» The Medieval Hebrew Version of Psychology in Avicenna's Salvation(Gabriella Berzin, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Literatures at Harvard)
» Sexual Pollution in the Hebrew Bible (Eve Samara Feinstein, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard)
» The Red Promised Land: Narratives of Jewish Mobility in Early Soviet Culture (Aleksandr Senderovich, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard)
ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL: DISSERTATIONS INVOLVING ANIMALS
» Learning From Drunk Monkeys: Expert Approaches to Alcohol and Drug Problems in Modern America(Jeremy Metlay Grischa, Department of History of Science at Harvard)
» Spirited Husbandry: The Literature and Science of Agricultural Improvement in 18th-century Britain(Elisabeth Bates Greenough, Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard)
» The Whig in "Swallow Barn": The Political and LIterary Culture of John Pendleton Kennedy(Andrew R. Black, Department of History at Boston University)
ALL THE TEA IN CHINA: 7 DISSERTATIONS ABOUT OUR FUTURE OVERLORDS
» Anarchy in the Pure Land: Tradition, Modernity, and the Reinvention of the Cult of Maitreya in Republican China(Justin R. Ritzinger, Committee on the Study of Religion at Harvard)
» Between Tortoise and Mirror: Historians and Historiography in 11th-century China(Chia-Fu Sung, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard)
» Capitalists, Cadres, and Culture in the 1950s China (Christopher Russell Leighton, Committee on History and East Asian Languages at Harvard)
» A Discourse Oriented Approach to Automatic Chinese Zero Anaphora Resolution (Xianghua Tu, Program in Applied Linguistics at Boston University)
» Found in Translation: Shakespeare's Cleopatra in English and Chinese(Laura Jane Wey, Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard)
» Wartime Diaspora: The reworking of Cultural and National Identity AMong Chinese and Japanese Writers in 1930s and 1940s Wartime China (May-Yi Shaw, Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard)
» Sinographics: Becoming Chinese Art (Nancy Ten-Jung Tewksbury, Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard)
