Terrell Russell: This Old Network

I spent the past week in Denver, CO at the ALISE annual conference. There were many nervous PhD students interviewing for faculty positions – but I was not one of them – still have a ways to go.

On Thursday, I presented the third paper to come out of the MPACT project, where we propose some analytics around academic mentorship.

MPACT Family Trees: Quantifying academic genealogy in library and information science:

Academic genealogy is valuable because it provides context, history and has the potential to predict future trends in the field. However, it is most commonly done casually and without the rigor to provide a platform for discussion beyond the anecdote. This paper presents a novel technique for calculating genealogical scores for individuals and academic “families.” This data-driven technique provides a platform for greater contextualization and insight into an academic’s legacy.

The slides of the talk are located on the project site.

Tags: alise - mpact - paper - slides