A case study in Gantt charts as historiophoty: A century of psychology at the University of Alberta.

Abstract

History is typically presented as historiography, where historians communicate via the written word. However, some historians have suggested alternative formats for communicating and thinking about historical information. One such format is known as historiophoty, which involves using a variety of visual images to represent history. The current article proposes that a particular type of graph, known as a Gantt chart, is well suited for conducting historiophoty. When used to represent history, Gantt charts provide a tremendous amount of information. Furthermore, the spatial nature of Gantt charts permits other kinds of spatial operations to be performed on them. This is illustrated with a case study of the history of a particular psychology department. The academic year 2009-2010 marked the centennial of psychology at the University of Alberta. This centennial was marked by compiling a list of its full-time faculty members for each year of its history. This historiography was converted into historiophoty by using it as the source for the creation of a Gantt chart. The current article shows how the history of psychology at the University of Alberta is revealed by examining this Gantt chart in a variety of different ways. This includes computing simple descriptive statistics from the chart, creating smaller versions of the Gantt to explore departmental demographics, and using image processing methods to provide measures of departmental stability throughout its history. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).

Exploring the Gantt chart as a tool to highlight double report in case series published during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The Gantt chart can be used in several situations, each with a particular view, with the intention to evaluate “temporal dependencies” [ 38 ]. It was used to tell the “historiophoty” of a university department [ 39 ], and, more recently, to describe the clinical course of COVID-19 cases across time [ 40 ], and to describe cases of COVID-19 in some psychiatric facilities [ 41 ].…”

Theoretical psychology at the University of Alberta as social science during the Cold War.

“…Furthermore, Royce had the good fortune to establish the center during a time in which there increasing support for Canadian postsecondary institutions (Hauserman & Stick, 2005). For instance, Royce was chair of the University of Alberta’s Department of Psychology when it was growing its size by about one new faculty member per year (Dawson, 2013a). The growth of Royce’s department reflected increasing financial support of postsecondary education in the province of Alberta.…”

“…While Royce appreciated the stability offered by university funding, the center’s ultimate reliance on provincial support later proved to be its downfall. For example, the steady rise in the size of the psychology department at the University of Alberta reversed when severe cuts in provincial funding began in the late 1980s (Dawson, 2013a). Shortly thereafter, the center was a casualty of these cuts, and was closed in 1991 (Mos & Kuiken, 1998).…”