Source #1: Alumni Directory
Format: We reached out to Alumni Information Systems at Carleton College to get a full data set of the alumni from 2000 to 2022. Hopefully when we hear back from our person of contact, we will receive a csv file with the data. Eventually, we will need to narrow this down to a particular major of our choosing, and this can be done through tools like google sheets or open refine.
Rights: Carleton College has the rights to this information. Since we will be getting this information through the Alumni Information Systems, we assume that it will already be censored by the college. The final data we get from the school will be information we can assume we are allowed to use since we have alerted them to the intentions of our project.
Privacy: The alumni directory directly refers to specific graduates of Carleton with very personal information like their home address, place of work, spousal information, etc. When we complete our project we are not focusing on this information though, so we will automatically avoid sharing the personal details. We will be anonymizing the data and looking at locations on a larger scale, so this will not reveal anything about individuals.
Source #2: Carletonian
Format: The Carletonian is the student-run newspaper for the Carleton College community. It comes in the form of student-created news pieces, opinions, and articles about general happenings around campus. There shouldn’t be any need to alter the information from the Carletonian aside from selecting pieces that we find interesting and applicable to our primary data set.
Rights: The rights to the stories are owned by the Carletonian but the actual happenings on campus are not, so we should be free to analyze the happenings on campus without relying on obtaining rights to use their stories.
Privacy: The Carletonian is a public news source where the authors and those interviewed can consent to including their names in their work. We can still anonymize names by just not including them when analyzing articles from the Carletonian.
Source #3: Carleton Library
Format: In the library archives there is a book available called the Carleton Alumni Directory. When we spoke with one of the librarians, they believed that the book would contain information about graduates from 1897 to an unspecified year. If it is alphabetical and if the book contains the years we hope to analyze, we could use this book’s information to look up alumni and display miscellaneous information about the alumni.
Rights: This book is owned by Carleton’s Gould Library, but isn’t available for check out. Likely, it is an item that we will need to visit the library to observe. This is because according to the library’s website, the book is considered to be “non-circulating” but “Item in place”.
Privacy: Of course, the alumni will be depicted in this data, likely showing their name, major, address, and potentially activity affiliations, likely in a yearbook style. We would anonymize the names of the alumni to ensure their privacy. Ethically, we need to ensure the privacy of the alumni remains.
Source #4: Academic Catalogs
Format: The academic catalog just provides archives of information on course requirements, scholarships, graduation requirements, etc. from Carleton’s past all the way to 1996-1997 school year. This data will not really need to be altered to take another form because we will mostly be analyzing it just to look for notable patterns that we can correlate with our data.
Rights: This information is owned by the registrar’s office of Carleton College because they have developed the requirements for graduation and courses in past years. It is openly accessible to anyone, so it seems like any material on the site will be open for our use and analysis.
Privacy: Luckily, this data does not include too many details regarding people’s personal information. It includes generalized requirements but does not name particular names or reveal direct information about individuals, so it is accessible without violating any privacy or ethical standards.
Source #5: Article giving context about current day graduate student in-state migration
Format: Forbes Article discussing a statistical analysis form a census dataset.
Rights: The information is owned by Forbes, and it is open access.
Privacy: The article does not violate the privacy of any individuals and does not cause any ethical problems.
