Yowzuh!  That's not only quite an opus, but also a thing of beauty you've
wrought.  Quite interesting, too.  I doff my virtual hat to you.

John Lolis
Coordinator of Computer Systems

100 Martine Avenue
White Plains, NY  10601

tel: 1.914.422.1497
fax: 1.914.422.1452

https://whiteplainslibrary.org/

*Some may say that perception is everything, but not from where I stand.*


On Fri, 14 Jan 2022 at 14:30, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>
> I have done a bit of compare & contrast when it comes to the Code4Lib
> mailing list. And I can demonstrate how discussions about specific
> computing issues in libraries have declined, and job postings have
> increased.
>
> In 2011, there were approximately 3,000 postings to the list for a total
> of .98 million words. By comparison, in 2021 there were 1700 postings and a
> total of .5 million words. To put it another way, the mailing list's volume
> has decreased by about half.
>
> I calculated quite a number of frequencies based on a wide variety of
> features (ngrams, parts-of-speech, named entities, etc.). In 2011 the names
> of people dominated the entities, but in 2022 the names of organizations
> dominated. When I did topic modeling against 2011, themes included:
> "conference", "library", and "data". On the other hand, themes from 2022
> included: "library", "experience", and "digital".
>
> Probably the most telling model was the word collocations. While the
> attached images may be too small to appreciate all the nuances, the 2011
> graph includes the names of many individual people and computing issues
> like "data", "MARC", and "RDF". The 2021 graph has a much larger emphasis
> on "experience", and there is a set of related words regarding race &
> gender, which come from the boiler plate paragraphs of job postings.
>
> Mailing lists aren't what they used to be. Of the mailing lists in which I
> subscribe, zero discussion happens. There are really only announcements. I
> suppose the Code4Lib mailing list is no different.
>
> That said, the mailing list's subscription base continues to slowly
> increase. We are about 3,800 people strong. On the other hand, a robot is
> the most frequent poster to the list. Signs of the times?  :-D
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship
> Hesburgh Libraries
> University of Notre Dame
>
> 574/631-8604
> https://cds.library.nd.edu
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