An exploratory digital analysis of the early years of G. Stanley Hall’s American Journal of Psychology and Pedagogical Seminary.

Abstract

In this article, we present the results of an exploratory digital analysis of the contents of the two journals founded in the late 19th century by American psychologist G. Stanley Hall. Using the methods of the increasingly popular digital humanities, some key attributes of the American Journal of Psychology (AJP) and the Pedagogical Seminary (PS) are identified. Our analysis reaffirms some of Hall's explicit aims for the two periodicals, while also revealing a number of other features of the journals, as well as of the people who published within their pages, the methodologies they employed, and the institutions at which they worked. Notably, despite Hall's intent that his psychological journal be strictly an outlet for scientific research, the journal-like its sister pedagogically focused publication-included an array of methodologically diverse research. The multiplicity of research styles that characterize the content of Hall's journals in their initial years is, in part, a consequence of individual researchers at times crossing methodological lines and producing a diverse body of research. Along with such variety within each periodical, it is evident that the line between content appropriate to one periodical rather than the other was fluid rather than absolute. The full results of this digitally informed analysis of Hall's two journals suggest a number of novel avenues for future research and demonstrate the utility of digital methods as applied to the history of psychology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Framing psychology as a discipline (1950–1999): A large-scale term co-occurrence analysis of scientific literature in psychology.

“…In this way, the abstracts/titles are used to generate terms, then the co-occurrences of these terms 3 The present study is the first of its kind considering the scope: we cover as much psychology as possible to extract largescale historical trends from the literature. Pioneering work on applying digital analysis to history of psychology has been done by Christopher Green's group of historians at York University (Green, 2017;Green, Feinerer, & Burman, 2013, 2015a, 2015bPettit, Serykh, & Green, 2015;Burman, Green, & Shanker, 2015;Young & Green, 2013;Green & Feinerer, 2015), but on a smaller scale and in a different time period. 4 An interesting approach to discourse-vocabulary-discipline investigation is the work of John Benjafield (2012Benjafield ( , 2013.…”

Thinking in multitudes: Questionnaires and composite cases in early American psychology

“…Hall’s programme of questionnaire-based research continued until 1915, but this form of practice failed to achieve prominence in psychology outside of Clark after initial experiments with the method from the first generation of American psychologists in the 1890s. What resulted was the continuation of published reports of questionnaire projects that centred around extensive excerpts from collected material, and the increasing segregation of the questionnaire projects produced at Clark University, under Hall’s guidance, to the realm of pedagogical rather than psychological research (Ross, 1972; Young, 2016; Young and Green, 2013).…”

G. Stanley Hall, Child Study, and the American Public

“…Following difficulties with the institution's benefactor and faculty members, the latter largely self-imposed, Hall sought to curry favor locally by engaging more directly with the broader educational community. To this end, in the early 1890s he instituted summer schools for educators at the University and founded a new journal, The Pedagogical Seminary, now The Journal of Genetic Psychology (Ross, 1972;Young & Green, 2013). He also initiated a new program of research on childhood.…”

“…Digital approaches to historical inquiry have gained ground within the history of psychology in recent years (e.g., Benjafield, 2016;Green, 2016;Green & Feinerer, 2015;Green, Feinerer, & Burman, 2013;Pettit, 2016;Pettit, Serykh, & Green, 2015;Young & Green, 2013), seeking to assemble, analyze, and depict a bulk of historical data. In this vein, in an effort to assess the scope of Hall's geographic reach and influence during the latter decades of the 19th century, a map of his travels during this era was constructed on the basis of newspaper coverage of his lectures.…”