Over the
last couple of weeks I have visited the University of Alberta Archives to pore
over their copies of past Calendars. As
part of a history project that I am presenting at the European Society for the
History of the Human Sciences (ESHHS) next month I
have compiled the course offering for Psychology from 1909 to 2015. This list is composed of 5089 separate
entries, which might explain why my eyes are tired and my typing fingers are
aching.
The point
of collecting this data is to illustrate it (and later analyze it) using Gantt
charts; a
previous project took this approach to illustrate the various faculty
members who have belonged to the Department in its existence for more than a
century. The previous project was pretty
laborious; this time around I have been able to automate a lot of it using
Excel (and VBA) to organize the data to provide to R (and the Plotrix package)
for plotting as a Gantt chart.
This
approach can be used to provide some interesting insights into Departmental
course offerings. For instance, the
figure below provides the Gantt chart of just those courses related to modern
cognitivism:
Interestingly,
though, this story is incomplete. One of
the earlier courses offered by the Department was ‘Legal Psychology (Psychology
56)’, which appeared in the 1922-23 Calendar, and was last offered in 1939-40. When it first appeared in the Calendar it was
described as a course about “normal and abnormal mental processes in relation
to problems of judicial procedure”, and explored topics like motivation of
crime, the discovery of guilt, mental deficiency and insanity, and
individualization of punishment. This
Calendar description was pretty much unchanged from the creation of this course
through the 1930-31 Calendar.
However,
the Calendar description of Legal Psychology changed markedly in the 1931-32
Calendar, as the image below demonstrates.
The description is split into two parts, with the second one being very
similar to the older entries. However, the
new first part is explicitly cognitive in nature: it includes the phrase “cognitive
processes”, and focuses on perception, memory, and problems arising in both of
these subtopics.
In short,
modern cognitivism arose late at the University of Alberta, although the Gantt
chart provided above indicates that it is still healthy. It was preceded, however, by a course in
Legal Psychology that was over a quarter of a century ahead of its time.