What is the AHA Visualization Project?
The American Historical Association (AHA) Visualization Project is a research project that aims to catalog and visualize data on the AHA’s annual meetings, dating back to the 1800s. The AHA is the oldest professional association of historians in the United States and one of the largest organizations of its kind in the world. Because of this, its annual meeting is one of the largest data sources to understand what American historians have been studying for nearly 150 years. Additionally, we can collect data on which institutions send historians to the AHA. By collecting this data, we can gain a deeper understanding of how the field of history has evolved and expanded.
This project is not associated with or funded by the AHA. It is supported by Smith College history professor Joshua Birk and his CODEX Medieval History Lab. All work has been done by Smith College students.
All data for this project was taken from the AHA’s official site and archived versions of previous meetings’ sessions.
Information on meetings before the mid-2000s is only available through digitized versions of the original meeting programs. Because of their varying quality and layouts, the most effective way to collect this data is through manual entry. Our team created extensive spreadsheets that collect the session names, paper names, participating institutions, the type of session (e.g., panel, paper presentation, luncheon), and any affiliated professional societies for each session at a given meeting. Additionally, we manually matched institutions to geographic data, including the city, country, and coordinates of the institution. For American institutions, we also recorded their state and census region.
Some meeting programs included topical indexes that categorized every session by the theoretical, temporal, or geographic focuses of the talks. These were primarily more modern (post-1970) meetings, which grew considerably in size compared to earlier conferences. Topics were recorded whenever they were provided.
More recent meetings are generally available online. To collect data from these meetings, our team developed a web-scraping method using R. This method collected data on session names, paper names, participating institutions, the type of session, and any affiliated professional societies for each session in the meeting.
As of December 2024, we have collected data from 61% of the AHA’s meetings, representing 69 years out of the 113 years in which a meeting occurred and the program is accessible in some way.
Because our data contains details on the location of each year’s session and the places where historians worked, we can analyze the geographic distribution of AHA historians, along with how attendance changes based on the location of the annual meeting.
For example, below is the geographic distribution of participants’ institutions at the 1970 meeting in Boston, MA:
- 40 states represented
- 7 countries represented
- 12.5% of participants worked in the Boston metropolitan area
- 19.8% of participants worked in New England
- Participants traveled an average of 563 miles (906 km) to the conference
This data is great for understanding the 1970 conference, but what’s even better is putting it in context! By comparing geographic data year to year, we can understand how the conference location influences the institutions represented.
Below is a GIF of the institutions represented at three AHA meetings: the 1970 meeting in Boston, the 1975 meeting in Atlanta, and the 1980 meeting in Washington, DC. The red dot represents the host city, while the black circles represent individual institutions. The size of each circle corresponds to how many historians attended that year’s meeting from a given institution.
This visualization clearly shows how the location of the AHA’s annual meeting changes how different institutions and regions are represented. While the greatest concentration of historians hailed from the Boston-to-Washington Northeast Corridor in each of these years, the proportion changed dramatically depending on where the conference was held.
In 1975, when the conference was in Atlanta, only 19.3% of historians (73 of 378) worked in the Mid-Atlantic or New England, compared to 26.6% (126 of 473) in 1970 and 23.9% (160 of 667) in 1970 and 1980. Additionally, the 1975 conference — one of only 15 AHA conferences to be held in the South — attracted a considerably higher proportion of Southern institutions, with 22.2% of all participating institutions hailing from the South, compared to 15.9% in 1970 and 13.3% in 1980.
Considerably more work is needed to complete this kind of analysis across all years. When completed, a comprehensive analysis of geographic data will allow our team to analyze how technological and social changes influenced the size of the AHA meetings, where participating historians worked, and how far they had to travel to get to the meeting.
But geographic data isn’t the only interesting thing about our dataset! By collecting data about the presentations given and the topics they’ve covered, we can gain a deeper understanding of what American historians have studied — and how their interests have changed over time.
The AHA meetings ballooned dramatically in size during the mid-to-late 20th century. At the 1960 meeting, there were 59 sessions. In 1970, there were over 100. Because of this, the AHA created a “topical index” section in the annual program, providing a short and simple overview of which sessions touched on which research areas.
This topical index turned out to be useful five decades later, too! The index gives us a useful snapshot of what historians were studying at the time. Below, for example, is a pie chart representing which topics were the most popular at the 1975 meeting in Atlanta.1
It’s clear that American history, unsurprisingly, dominated the research of American historians, with European history in a distant second place.
Some interests are unique to the era — such as presentations on the American bicentennial, celebrated in 1976. Others are much broader and continuously relevant sub-fields, such as social, comparative, or political approaches to historical research.
Again, this data is interesting on its own but it becomes much more meaningful in comparison.
Below is a chart of the most common words in session titles at the 2023 annual meeting.2
Just like in 1975, American history dominates the field. However, European histories — including sub-fields, such as British or Russian history — have completely fallen off the map, replaced by a focus on global/world histories. Chinese history also makes an appearance, a stark difference from the two sessions in 1975 that touched on Chinese history at all.
Of course, these two charts are not entirely comparable. One is built off an AHA-made topical index with a discrete amount of topics, while the other is a summary of over 900 unique keywords. Even when two years both have topical indexes, directly comparing across years is difficult, as changes in terminology give a skewed impression of which subjects were the most popular.
In the future, our team plans to develop our own topical index, accounting for the temporal, geographic, and theoretical focus of sessions across all 100+ years of the AHA’s history. This will allow us to create comprehensive and fair comparisons between different years and gain a deeper understanding of what historians were studying.
Ultimately, we don’t just want this data to be accessible to our team. We want this data to be publicly accessible and navigable for anyone who may be interested in the history of the AHA, or American historiography at large!
We are in the process of developing a site that will let anyone in the world explore AHA session data by year, session type, topic, and keyword(s). We also hope to expand this site in the future to allow users to explore the geographic data discussed above. The site is still a work in progress and is not currently accessible to the public, but the GIF below provides a sneak-peak at its look and function:
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This site was developed by Lucy O’Brien, Smith class of 2026.
Xiye Sylvia Tan ‘25, Selin Apaydın ‘24, Raley Long ‘25, Jenny Yang ‘25, Audrey Bloom ‘25, and Simone Tricca ‘25 all worked on the AHA project and provided their invaluable time and labor, even when the going got tough or really, really dull.
Special thanks are due to Professor Joshua Birk, who has supported and led this project since its inception.