Abstract

The prestige of an academic institution may be determined as a function of affiliations with other academic institutions. Using digital tools to data-scrape, data-mine, and perform network analysis on university websites, an approximation of numbers of academic affiliations may be measured. Especially observing the alma mater institutions of the faculty of employed institutions, these numbers show the relative employment of alumni and a proxy metric for the relative prestige of their degree-granting institutions. These affiliations can be charted and graphed to determine the distributions of affiliations throughout an academic ecosystem from which we might draw conclusions about that system’s hierarchies and inequalities. Here we use anglophone PhD-granting philosophy departments as a case study for this methodology with tentative conclusions.