Dissertation Workbench

Beta

View research, explore related themes, and discover patterns across UBC's theses and dissertations from 1919 onward. Note that theses and dissertations continue to be indexed, and the catalogue here is not a complete representation of those held by cIRcle, made available through Open Collections.

The Dissertation Workbench extracts and enriches metadata from UBC Open Collections, offering new ways to consider connections between people, research, and topics.

Some metadata is calculated, including word and page counts. Themes and concepts come from n-gram analysis; topics are generated from manuscript abstracts using BERTopic. The workbench remains a work in progress, and some edge-case errors remain.

Retrieved Documents

Title Author Year Degree Pages Words

Average Page Length by Year

Manuscripts by Year

Mean Word Count by Year

Manuscript Length Trend (Median Pages by Year)

Concept Frequency Over Time

Word Cloud (Themes)

Top unigrams extracted via TF-IDF from titles, abstracts, and subject headings.

Concept Cloud

Multi-word concepts matched against a domain dictionary built from corpus n-grams.

Methodology Detection

Methodology signals are keyword-based and may overlap; counts are not mutually exclusive.

Methodology – Concept Matrix

Manuscripts

Title Author Year Refs

Works Cited

Select a document to view its works cited.

Foundational Works

Citations appearing across the most manuscripts in this corpus.

People

Connections between people and theses and dissertations have been reconstructed from statements in the documents themselves. Where authoritative metadata exists indicating the dissertation or thesis supervisor, that metadata takes precedence here. However, supervisor metadata is only available from 2018 onward in UBCV manuscripts, based on sampling.

Name Docs Roles Years

Select a person to view their profile.

Discovery & Connections

UBC Open Collections offers an entry point into the university's graduate-level scholarship. Dissertation Workbench interacts with Open Collections through its public APIs, and enriches and links thesis and dissertation metadata in ways that may support researchers and graduate students with discovery — in terms of thematic and conceptual connections, methodologies, and even supervisor interests.

Metadata as Narrative

The purpose of the tool is to tell the story of UBC's research through metadata. That is, metadata already stored in Open Collections, and also through metadata enrichment conducted by the workbench (through document parsing, NLP, and other mechanisms).

Current Scope

The workbench covers UBC theses and dissertations from 1919 onward, drawn from cIRcle through Open Collections. Indexing is ongoing, so the catalogue here is not yet a complete representation of the collection.