This post was written by Maria Bear, during the course of her internship at NYU Special Collections in the Spring of 2025. She is pursuing her MA from NYU in Religious Studies and her MLIS from Long Island University, as part of the Dual Degree Program.

When I first set out to explore NYU’s archives in search of materials that might support an exhibit about the University’s athletic history, I did not expect to find myself pursuing a large data project. I did what most researchers would: I went to the reading room. I explored the yearbooks, the athletics department records, biographical files on major athletes. I spoke with the University Archivists. Like all research, it was a conversation. From the beginning, my supervisor and chief collaborator in this effort, Danielle Nista, and I knew that we were interested in the social and cultural dimensions of sport. As a Master’s candidate in both Religious Studies and Library and Information Sciences, I understood sport to be what Michel Foucault would call a “technology of the self”(1), which, like religion, is often instrumental in creating social identities.

Thus, we wanted to understand how students at NYU might have come to understand sports, how it was mediated to them. We quickly found that a good deal had already been written about the history of athletics at NYU, particularly by Barnett W. “Russ” Hamberger, whose existing publication covers men’s sports at NYU up until the 1920s (2). He is also currently in the process of researching women’s sports for the same time period. I was also initially excited to prioritize the 1941 Leonard Bates story, but we quickly discovered that University of Miami Professor Donald Spivey has already written an exquisitely detailed account of the entire Bates Must Play movement (3). 

Women’s Basketball Team, The Album (1922), NYU Archives Collection of Yearbooks, MC.304

So, I had to consider how I might be able to contribute to this growing body of information about NYU sports and identity. We returned to the notion of mediation. How did NYU students come to receive their contemporaneous information about athletics? And thus, we turned to microfilm. This is where I began to notice some clear and ongoing discrepancies. Having looked at yearbooks, I knew that women had been participating in sport since at least the 1922, when the first photos of women’s sports teams show up. As you can see in the photo to the left from the 1922 Album, the yearbook of the Washington Square College, the women’s basketball team was active and featured at least one woman of color, an Asian American student (4). 

Alas, although the yearbooks show women, and even, occasionally, women of color, participating in sports as early as the 1920s, an exploration of issues of the Washington Square College’s student newspaper, then the Washington Square Bulletin, showed that this activity was not being reported on as part of NYU’s sport culture, or at least, not to the extent that it was actually taking place. 

My task, then, became clarifying how much was being covered – and how much was not. And if I wanted to understand the relative frequency of articles on women’s sports, I needed a metric against which to compare them. Therefore, I began documenting every article focused on athletics that appeared in the Washington Square Bulletin beginning in 1933, the earliest roll of microfilm available beginning in the 1930s, and so as not to overlap with other ongoing research ending in the 1920s. I then developed a process for coding each article. I wanted to understand each piece in terms of sport and gender, but also in terms of its other intersections. 

Women’s Basketball Team, The Album (1925), NYU Archives Collection of Yearbooks, MC.304

For the time being, these intersections are not included in the visualization, but tracked in the database using individual identification numbers as joins to connect stories in the same issue. I have noted, where available, when sports stories co-occur with issues of race and culture. On the rare occasions when the race of a player or a racial dynamic is mentioned explicitly, I have tracked this using a notes column in the spreadsheet. Perhaps if we continue the analysis, we will find enough references to develop parameters with which to visualize racial dynamics and other cultural factors as well.  

With all of this in mind, I chose to use gender as the primary fulcrum upon which to balance the data as currently visualized. As it is important to note, this also came with complexities. I divided the spreadsheet into men’s sports, women’s sports, and intramural sports. Intramural sports present a potential opportunity that I am hopeful a future researcher might take up. In the intramural sports spreadsheet, we find moments when it is unclear exactly who is playing. This may mean that the reporter is using men’s sport as the default as they do elsewhere, but, because of the informality of many intramurals, it may mean that there are moments when students played together regardless of gender. A precedent for this may be found in the “mixed doubles” events in tennis and handball. Given predominantly binary discourses about sport and gender, intramural college sports might present a useful data set for exploration by researchers interested in dismantling those logics. 

Screenshot of data visualized in plotly

As women’s sports received such a dismally small amount of coverage compared with men’s sports, where women’s intramural sports are mentioned, I have coded these articles both in the intramural tab and in the women’s sports tab. What results from gathering the data this way is the ability to visualize the disparity in coverage between women’s and men’s sport. Using python and plotly, I’ve developed the scatterplot excerpted here to visualize the first 456 stories. Once the data were logged in the spreadsheet, I was able to use pandas to cross-tabulate them by date and sport, aggregating by month, and plotting them on separate timelines for men and women. I have also automated the size of each aggregated dot to correspond to the total number of mentions per sport per month.  

In the live version, users will be able to hover over each dot to see the sport, the date, and the number of mentions in the Washington Square Bulletin. Here, we can clearly see the massive disparity in coverage. When we use this chart in conjunction with the story database, we can see that men’s sports received more coverage even when the men’s teams were losing and the women’s teams were winning. For example, in 1933, the Violet football team received cover story after cover story, over 40 stories that year, despite their abysmal season. 

Washington Square Bulletin Vol. II No. 12 November 13, 1933. New York University Archives, Collection of the Washington Square Bulletin. RG.39.189 Box: Shared University Archives 105. Reel 5045.

The season was bad enough to prompt the hiring of a new coach and a massive debate about whether or not to continue having a “big time” football team, or for that matter, a football team at all (5). That same year, the women’s swimming team, known sometimes as the Mermaids and at other times as the Naiads, received hardly any coverage, only four stories at the height of their season, despite, in the words of that year’s Album, proving itself “the strongest team in the annals of New York University for either men or women”(6). 

With this approach, I hope to have provided a template that we can use to continue understanding how sports coverage has been mediated to NYU students over time. I look forward to seeing how the above model changes as more and more data get added to the frame. As we move forward in time to see the frequency of NYU’s publications expand and the data set gets larger in every category, how will women’s sports stack up? I have also been tracking coverage of wins and losses. What will it look like if we add that into our visualization? Hopefully, this initial platform provides a starting point for an ongoing collaboration that allows us to understand how gender and other forms of identity have interacted with news coverage of athletics at NYU. 

Notes

1. Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press. https://monoskop.org/images/0/03/Technologies_of_the_Self_A_Seminar_with_Michel_Foucault.pdf
2. Hamberger, B. (2024). Violet Roots: New York University Athletics in the Nineteenth Century. Independently Published.
3. Spivey, D. (2021). Racism, Activism, and Integrity in College Football: The Bates Must Play Movement. Carolina Academic Press.
4. New York University Washington Square College. (1922). The Album. New York University Archives Collection of Yearbooks. MC.304.
5. Kanner, S. L. (1934). “Issue of Big Time Football is Renewed.” Washington Square Bulletin. Vol. II. No. 24. February 28, 1934. New York University Archives, Collection of the Washington Square Bulletin. RG.39.189 Box: Shared University Archives 105. Reel 5045.
6. New York University Washington Square College. (1933). The Album. New York University Archives Collection of Yearbooks. MC.304.