 |
 |
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 > > > > > > > > > > > > > >