I’ve added RSS feeds from blogs about librarians, data, and data visualization to Feedly recently, which I was going through the other evening. When I came across this particular picture, though, I paused. What do you notice about it?
Earlier this semester, I met with a student looking for ways to easily analyze news articles and social media. For anonymity purposes, we’ll say that Anna* was researching girl scout cookies*. Everyone loves Samoas, am I right? Now some librarians look up a topic before a student arrives, so that they have…
I’ve spent a little time playing with infographics recently. Infogr.am is a pretty user-friendly service that let me pull together the graphic on young librarians below. The data and quotes are from Library Journal, my survey of recent MLS grads, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (but see ALA). I share this with caveats
Because young single professionals are so… sparse in the north, I’ve taken a glance or two at online dating profiles. You know, the ones in which men of all ages post a few grizzly selfies and attempt to promote their virtues to the young ladies of 2015: As with my earlier posts on…
Google loves data. I’ve reviewed Google nGrams before; built on top of their massive project to scan published books, it’s a way to study how our written culture changes over time. Below, I’ll cover a few more interesting tools, which I hope will be fun for you to play around with: 1. Find what…
In 1861, Lotte Fischer crossed the Atlantic on a steamship that likely took seventeen days to travel from Bremen to New York. She reported that she was a German girl, travelling alone. Within a few years, she married a German immigrant named Johann and settled in Ohio. But as…
It’s a snowy weekend as I draft this with a cup of hot cocoa in hand 🙂 I went over my survey of 385 young librarians before, as well as critiqued my own methods. In this post, I’ll try working with Excel data. Please bear in mind that a) I’m blogging my own…
A few years ago: I saunter up to an apartment building and a man rings me in. Inside, the apartment door is open; shoes lie scattered in a wood-paneled entryway. A large woman sits on the sofa, and a short one introduces herself. Amy* then follows her infant son around…
Have you ever wanted to grab information from a website but found it time-consuming to copy-paste everything? Well, here’s your way around that! A few weeks ago I ran across an extension of Chrome that lets you gather and transform information from webpages. Normally, this sort of thing requires some technical…
I’ve just finished reading Uncharted (2013), in which Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel describe how they convinced Google to create the Ngram Viewer. This is a great tool that lets you analyze word frequency across millions of books, and a powerful set of data that you can play with for free–so try…