Two years ago, my colleague Stephen Woods approached me about collaborating on an article1 extending research he’d already performed about serials use in doctoral sociology work. He and another colleague, John Russell, had developed a methodology for determining “CDRank” based on the number of times a journal was citated across a dissertation dataset and the number/% of dissertations it was cited in.2 On his sabbatical, Stephen had mined citations in 518 sociology dissertations from Big...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This one’s mostly administrivia, but possibly of interest for those of you who only want a subset of what I post here. As I’ve mentioned previously, this site runs on Hugo with a theme I periodically tweak and/or break. Right now it’s just the right mix of dependencies and simple, static, markdown-based content management. Hugo publishes RSS feeds for the site as a whole, an everything feed, and then separate feeds as index.xml under any area, e.g. posts/, talks/, quilts/, categories/, ...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
There's a common misunderstanding that the land that was granted is the land that the university is on. But the land grant involved far more land and the displacement of far more people than just the land occupied by the university. Penn State's endowment, for example, was created through the sale of three quarters of a million acres of the lands of more than 100 other nations, tribes, and bands to our west.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
This spring, we tested Summon's new "Research Assistant," a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) tool which queries a subset of their Central Discovery Index. This post outlines the few good things we found along with its many shortcomings. It may still be better than random tools they find online, but the bar is in hell.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
An exploration of how we are using macros in our current system, contrasted with what we're getting pitched by vendors. We want to: enter consistent data, avoid typos, improve system design, add conditional logic, and generally save the user repetitive, mindless work. Right now, that seems to require macros.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Today mom would’ve turned 80 years old. It could’ve been a pretty epic Mother’s Day celebration. Instead, this summer, we’ll mark 15 years without her. I’m still not as old as she was when she became a mother, my mother. Later this year, I’ll turn 40 and we could have celebrated my being half her age, finally. When I was a kid, I used to tell her “someday I’ll be 40 and you’ll be 80.” I really had no idea what those meant besides numbers. After so many years, missing her r...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Earlier this month, Jessy at Library Shenanigans posted some charming onomatopetic instructions for circ workers performing checkins at a freshly-automated library in the 1990s. The “Doot-doot” and “Deedle-deedle-dee” are delightful. They may have been a little annoying. But what struck me about the post is that they solve a problem I’ve been aware of for a good 15+ years. And they did so a good decade before I first recall encountering it. The Problem: Popups, Barcodes, and Returns...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
While extremely rare, Nasacort nasal spray can have the side effect of severe anxiety or even suicidal ideation. This post describes my experience going from fully managed anxiety to planning suicide after only 3 days of using Nasacort. I wrote about it primarily so that others experiencing similar side effects can know they're not alone and that stopping Nasacort was very effective for me in returning to normal.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
I manage this site and several of my others using Hugo, a static site generator based on the “Go” language. I’ve learned a little bit about Hugo themes over time, not as much as I used to know about Wordpress, but enough to whip up a few mini site themes from scratch and heavily modify the academic theme I use on this one. A little knowledge is, of course, dangerous. As I posted on the 15th, I’ve added a quilt module to the site. These publish to the main RSS as well as their own loca...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
Coding up a new section of the website to document and share some of the many quilts I've made over the years.| Ruth Kitchin Tillman
On Sunday afternoon, I got out of the shower to find Micah waiting for me. “Your dad called,” he said, “It sounds important. Call him back.” When I called my dad, he told me that the nurses said I should come home. They thought Mom had days, it was possible she had a week or two, but I should probably come home now. Fortunately, I’d saved up leave time and I’d talked to my bosses about the possibility that I might be called away suddenly. So heading up on Sunday night wasn’t a p...| Ruth Kitchin Tillman