A new database is extending the life of the syllabus beyond the first day of class.
Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, hopes the repository of one million syllabi he posted today on his Web site will help fuel academic scholarship.
“What this provides is a really large cross-section of teaching,” he says.
The database is culled from more than a million searches made by users of Mr. Cohen’s Syllabus Finder, a service he created in 2002, and hosted on the center’s site, that allowed users to search for syllabi and information contained within them.
The database contains all of the syllabi retrieved through the Syllabus Finder from July 2002 until September 2009, when changes to Google’s search function disabled the program.
Mr. Cohen has analyzed the data periodically over the years, using it, for example, to identify the most popular syllabi in history and philosophy, and for a paper about the most popular textbooks in U.S. history classes and their perceived shortcomings as represented by supplemental assigned texts.
He thinks the data are valuable for what they can show about trends and changes in academe. “You can see shifts in the way that, for example, art history is assigned,” he says.
But he hopes researchers will use the data to consider questions that have never even crossed his mind.
He made efforts to remove duplicate results by removing entries with the same URL, but the database may contain multiple copies of the same syllabus if it appeared on different Web sites or was used by a professor teaching at multiple colleges, he says. He says it probably also includes some items—class assignments, for example—that look like syllabi but are not.
The syllabi are available in an SQL database that can be downloaded directly from his page or from a torrent that has been established to host it. The full text of the syllabi is searchable within one of the database fields.
Mr. Cohen’s analysis of the data might have already had a tangible impact for professors whose syllabi he highlighted. “I got some nice notes back that they were putting it in their promotion and tenure packets,” he says.
