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Hiring and Placement in the iSchools

Written on November 11, 2011 at 2:29 pm, by

A growing body of literature examines trends in department prestige, graduate employment, and faculty hiring in academic fields such as communication, computer science, economics, higher education administration, and political science. Until recently, we had no similar empirical literature about the relative prestige or reputations of information graduate programs. Emilee Rader (now at Michigan State) and I collected data about graduate placement and faculty hiring in iSchools between 2004 and 2010, and using that data, developed two ranking mechanisms for information graduate programs.

In summary, our data indicate that

  • 14% of iSchool graduates are placed in tenure-track positions at iSchools
  • 40% of iSchool graduates are placed outside academia
  • Less than 50% of the tenure-track faculty hired by iSchools graduated from iSchools

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Academia, Research 1 Comment

Bash script for adding MySQL users

Written on November 9, 2011 at 11:16 pm, by

Now that we’re using Amazon EC2 for our lab computing needs, I find I’m doing many server maintenance tasks over and over again. One of my least favorites is adding new MySQL users. So, I wrote a bash script that makes adding them easier. You can get the script at our Github organization or see the code after the jump. Read more

Code No Comments

Qualitatively Coding Tweets

Written on November 9, 2011 at 11:51 am, by

In studying politicians on Twitter, one of my goals is to understand what they’re talking about. The trouble is, tweets are incredibly difficult to code. Researchers at Maryland claimed success with a coding scheme for Congress’ tweets, but my colleagues, students, and I were never able to reach acceptable inter-rater reliability using their scheme (see our new scheme after the jump). We tried a few times, even met to discuss and adjust disagreements, and now I’m suspicious about the reliability of Golbeck’s scheme. The authors don’t provide their kappas, just percent agreement. The problem there is that percent agreement isn’t a good measure of reliability. Especially when the categories are numerous, broad, or incredibly narrow, high percent agreement can be misleading. Matthew Lombard has an excellent guide to interrater reliability where you can learn more. Read more

Research, Social Computing 2 Comments

ChiBudget dominates Twitter discussion too

Written on November 4, 2011 at 6:48 pm, by

Chicago Aldermen Joe Moreno (Ward 1) and Brendan Reilly (Ward 42) live tweeted the Chicago budget meetings in late October. As the visualization below shows (click it to see the big version at Many Eyes), the #chibudget hash tag dominated all Aldermen’s discussions between 10/24 and 11/4. Even though 28 Aldermen have Twitter accounts, only 19 posted during that period. As a social media junkie and progressive, I’m glad to live in Ward 1 with Alderman Moreno on my side.

Aldermen Tweeting Many Eyes

Academia, Research, Social Computing No Comments

A Little Press, Some Acceptance for Public Officials on Twitter Projects

Written on November 2, 2011 at 11:38 am, by

The Aldermen and Congress on Twitter projects made it into popular press and another conference this morning. You can read the popular press story from the Medill News site and conference abstracts below the jump. The papers investigate connections Aldermen make with their constituents via Twitter and how the language members of Congress use can be used to predict their offline political behaviors. Read more

Academia, Presentations, Research No Comments