Final Project for LIS 590 DML – Document Modeling (Fall, 2012)
Analyzing Data Table Accessibility in the Open Doors Report, 1955/56 – 2010/2011 (link to project page)
Introduction:
The United States is one of the world’s largest hosts of international students, with the number of hosted students rising significantly over the past 60 years. As part of an attempt to determine how many students are studying in the United States at a given time, the Open Doors report on the number of international students studying in the United States has been published yearly since 1954 by the Institute of International Education (IIE). These reports have been issued in a variety of formats using multiple survey procedures. The difficulty with changing methodologies and report types means that the data available in each year’s reports is not directly comparable to previous and subsequent years, despite the potential usefulness of the data for tracking enrollment trends over time. For this paper I explored which types of data are continuously available, which data types have been added or eliminated, and other problems with data retrieval with a mind to possibilities for future digitization and database searching of the data. I sought to determine if it would be possible to digitize and code this data in a relatively simple way so as to make searching the reports for basic demographic data possible.
Paige Cunningham 