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…
I’ve discussed numbers of library school graduates vs. total librarians before, but wanted to give you guys a few more numbers. Keep in mind that these are rough estimates at best: we’re dealing with large numbers, and everyone uses data to serve their organization’s goals, from the American Library…
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…
I recently surveyed 385 young librarians on Facebook about their job-seeking experience, and reviewed the initial results here. In this post, I’d like to reflect on what I learned about online survey methods and cleaning data, before going on to discuss results in more detail in my post on using Excel. Survey Methods: Using…
Where do young librarians end up? In conversation with the ALA Think Tank group on Facebook this fall, it’s evident that recent grads struggle to understand the job market and whether their experiences are comparable to others. Library Journal gives out yearly stats on salary and placement, but it doesn’t ask what…
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 been taking a free course on statistical inference online, which mentioned the World Values Survey. For this survey, interviewers ask people about religious, political, sexual, community, and life values. I haven’t looked at whether sample size, selection, fear of interviewers, or bias may affect the results. I suspect there…
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…
It has been interesting to see WikiLeaks unfold, and while I’m concerned about the potential harm, it also has me thinking again about what it means to have data be accessible, and online. When we talk about open access to anthropology, should that in some way include letting our colleagues…
We’ve been back in the province center for almost a week now. We’ll probably be staying here for another week, as Professor Rose and Jamie leave Mongolia next week… and Sarah leaves for Kazakhstan at the same time. Life in Ulgii has fallen into a regular pattern – so that’s what I…