The Carleton College admissions department has been collecting detailed data since 2013, (and less detailed data for years prior). In terms of digitally usable datapoints, Mike Kotchevar was an invaluable resource for the creation of this project. He manages data research for the admissions department and helpfully forwarded us a massive spreadsheet of anonymized student data.
This spreadsheet proved to be quite messy and unwieldy at first though. So we used a software called OpenRefine to sift through the data. Its “clustering” function allowed us to combine data values that were effectively identical. For example, an initial glance at the 78,000+ datapoints shows 88 unique values in the “student” decisions column; however, OpenRefine’s functionality and careful work from Isaac and Paul revealed that there are really only 12 distinct (and relevant) categories.
We made another dataset by extracting data from the Carleton Zoobooks preserved in Carleton’s Digital Collections. Spanning from 1955 to 2023, these Zoobooks contain articles for new students. On the final page of each article, a US map detailing the number of students hailing from various US states is shown. Through collective effort and dedicated labor, we entered these values into Google Sheets at five-year intervals.
