Iowa Writers’ Workshop

Abstract

The Program Era Project (PEP) has assembled three datasets related to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW), one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the US.

Dey House, home of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Source.

The Program Era Project (PEP) has assembled three related datasets of information on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (IWW):

1. The first dataset includes full, given, middle, family, pen names, gender, and country of origin information for students and teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1931 and Spring 2014.

2. The second dataset includes thesis and matriculation records for Iowa graduates between 1931 and Spring 2014, including graduate name, advisor name, year of matriculation, program, degree, thesis title, and literary genre.

3. The third dataset includes works by notable Iowa Writers’ Workshop authors that are held by the HathiTrust Digital Library, as well as HathiTrust IDs for each title.

Significance and Context

This data will be useful to any literary historian or analyst interested in the significance of creative writing programs generally and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop specifically. For instance, someone studying literary networks could trace connections between and amongst writers, editors, and agents; someone studying the significance of region and place could follow authorial itineraries in relation to literary subject matter; or someone studying literary influence could examine relations between mentors and mentees. Many other uses would be possible, especially with other data sets available for comparison.

This dataset offers some initial glimpses into the makeup of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Nationality: From this period, 96.4% of IWW-affiliated authors come from the United States, .9% from Canada, and 2.7% from other countries.

Gender: 57.9% of the authors are listed as male, 38.3% as female, 3.9% as unknown and <1% as gender nonconforming.

Additionally, we find 75.6% of works are identified as male-authored volumes and 24.4% female-authored volumes.

1. Students and Teachers

The first dataset includes full, given, middle, family, pen names, gender, and country of origin information for students and teachers at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop between 1931 and Spring 2014.

Data Table

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under CC BY 4.0

Collection and Creation

These data were initially derived from University of Iowa Library catalog records of MFA theses.

In order to assess demographic trends, we have also assigned gender information for authors. This data was collected by researching biographical information available on authors included in our database. When no biographical information on an author was available, the PEP team attempted to infer (when possible) the author’s most likely gender based on name. While there are instances where an individual author’s gender identity information may not be discernible, our data does allow for a reliable aggregate examination of gender trends in the IWW over time.

At a later stage, persistent identifiers, such as VIAF, LCCN, and Wikidata identifiers, were added by Matt Miller (Post45 DC Data Analyst) computationally.

Description

• person_id: numeric id of the individual in the Program Era database

• full_name: name as listed in University of Iowa records in “Lastname, Firstname Middlename” format

• given_name: (first name)

• middle_name

• family_name: (last name)

• pen_name: preferred pen name of the writer, if different from full name (not exhaustive)

• gender: as provisionally labeled by the PEP team based on name; intended for study of broad patterns over time and not as definitive statements on any individual identity. values ‘Male’, ‘Female’, ‘Gender Nonconfor’, ‘Unknown’

• country: country of origin

This dataset also includes various persistent identifiers for matching authors:

• author_lccn – Author’s LCCN from id.loc.gov
• author_viaf – Author viaf.org cluster number
• author_wikidata – Author’s Wikdiata Q number
• author_authorized_heading– Author’s authorized Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) heading

2. Thesis and Graduation Records

The second dataset includes thesis and matriculation records for Iowa graduates between 1931 and Spring 2014, including graduate name, advisor name, year of matriculation, program, degree, thesis title, and literary genre.

Collection and Creation

These data were initially derived from University of Iowa Library catalog records of MFA theses. Additional data (primarily genre and advisor) were filled in by checking bound copies of theses held in the University Archives. Also included are a small number (~1.5% of total) of BA records from other institutions for early faculty and additional degrees earned at Iowa by IWW grads and faculty (e.g., several IWW graduates also have Nonfiction Writing Program MFAs).

Description

• record_id: numeric id of the graduation record in the Program Era database

• graduate_name: full name of the graduating student

• graduate_id: foreign key referring to person_id of the graduating student in people.csv

• institution: name of degree-granting institution

• advisor_name: full name of the student’s thesis advisor

• advisor_id: foreign key referring to person_id of the thesis advisor in people.csv

• year: year of matriculation (range 1920-2014)

• program: program (e.g. Writers’ Workshop) or major when no specific program applies (e.g. English)

• degree: e.g. “MFA”

• thesis_title: Title of thesis where applicable

• genre: literary genre of the thesis, e.g. “Poetry”, “Fiction”, “Literary Translation”

This dataset also includes various persistent identifiers:

• author_lccn – Author’s LCCN from id.loc.gov
• author_viaf – Author viaf.org cluster number
• author_wikidata – Author’s Wikdiata Q number
• author_authorized_heading– Author’s authorized Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) heading

3. Books — HathiTrust Metadata

The third dataset includes works by notable Iowa Writers’ Workshop authors that are held by the HathiTrust Digital Library, as well as HathiTrust IDs for each title.

Collection and Creation

In addition to the biographical and institutional data described above, we have provided a collection of metadata and publication data connected to a corpus of volumes written by authors affiliated with the IWW. This corpus, provided by the HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), is comprised of 1228 volumes with 240 unique individuals listed as main authors. Because we knew it would be impossible to assemble a comprehensive corpus of every author in our institutional dataset and because we knew that many authors who attended the IWW never published work, when building our corpus in collaboration with HTRC we used two selection criteria. First, we searched HTRC’s collections for works by any author listed as director of a IWW graduate’s thesis. Secondly, given that we intend our database to drive a public-facing web service, we searched for authors from Wikipedia’s “List of Iowa Writers’ Workshop people,” as this list constituted an example of an externally and publicly defined list of notable IWW authors. We also felt these criteria would maximize our success rate at finding published works for our author list.

The volume publication data and metadata provided follow the model established by Ted Underwood’s dataset submitted to the Post45 Collective. Along with author and title information, we have listed each volume’s publisher as well as publication date and location (from MARC metadata). We have also provided Library of Congress and OCLC catalog information for the volumes.

Description

• hathi_id: HathiTrust item identifier number

• hathi_rights - the rights code from Hathi Trust

All HathiTrust Rights Codes

HathiTrust Rights Codes (Source)

id	name	type	dscr
1	pd	copyright	public domain
2	ic	copyright	in-copyright
3	op	copyright	out-of-print (implies in-copyright)
4	orph	copyright	copyright-orphaned (implies copyright)
5	und	copyright	undetermined copyright status
6	umall	access	available to UM affiliates and walk-in patrons (all campuses)
7	ic-world	access	in-copyright and permitted as world viewable by the copyright holder
8	nobody	access	available to nobody; blocked for all users
9	pdus	copyright	public domain only when viewed in the US
10	cc-by-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution license, 3.0 Unported
11	cc-by-nd-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license, 3.0 Unported
12	cc-by-nc-nd-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license, 3.0 Unported
13	cc-by-nc-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, 3.0 Unported
14	cc-by-nc-sa-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, 3.0 Unported
15	cc-by-sa-3.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, 3.0 Unported
16	orphcand	copyright	orphan candidate - in 90-day holding period (implies in-copyright)
17	cc-zero	copyright	Creative Commons Zero license (implies pd)
18	und-world	access	undetermined copyright status and permitted as world viewable by the depositor
19	icus	copyright	in copyright in the US
20	cc-by-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
21	cc-by-nd-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
22	cc-by-nc-nd-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
23	cc-by-nc-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license
24	cc-by-nc-sa-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
25	cc-by-sa-4.0	copyright	Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
26	pd-pvt	access	public domain but access limited due to privacy concerns
27	supp	access	suppressed from view; see note for details

• title: the short title of the work as listed in HathiTrust

• author: matching person from IWW

• oclc: a unique identifier for this volume as registered in WorldCat

This dataset also includes various persistent identifiers and information from OCLC:

• author_lccn – Author’s LCCN from id.loc.gov
• author_viaf – Author viaf.org cluster number
• author_wikidata – Author’s Wikdiata Q number
• author_authorized_heading– Author’s authorized Name Authority Cooperative (NACO) heading
• oclc_eholdings– from OCLC Classify – the electronic holdings count
• oclc_holdings – from OCLC Classify – the total holdings count
• oclc: a unique identifier for this volume as registered in WorldCat
• oclc_owi – from OCLC Classify – the Classify work identifier
• oclc_isbn – the ISBN from the OCLC MARC record

Ethical Considerations

Our IRB board has determined that none of our information violates the privacy or confidentiality of anybody listed in the database, although we are willing to partially or totally remove information about anyone upon their request. Other than gender, we have not tagged any of our entries with demographic data that might be considered sensitive or subjective.

The gender information for authors in this data was collected by researching biographical information available on authors included in our database. When no biographical information on an author was available, the PEP team attempted to infer (when possible) the author’s most likely gender based on name. While there are instances where an individual author’s gender identity information may not be discernable, our data does allow for a reliable aggregate examination of gender trends in the IWW over time.