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Despite the job market for academia (#IchBinHanna) many of us are still writing a PhD. This professional right rite of passage started in the 19th-century in Berlin (despite many controversies) and has remained fairly unchallenged in the following centuries. But what do PhD students write about? How varied or canonical is our research, and what can we learn from looking at the patterns computers can help us find? In this talk I hope to share the findings of text mining more than one thousand dissertations presented in German universities in the past 20 years as well as some visualizations of dissertations metadata from the metadata of thousands of dissertations from the German National Library. My aim is to spark a conversation about what this data tells us and how we could use this map of travelled traveled paths to seek for the untold tales in research.
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