Why do I have to pretend that I'm going to print something in order to save it as a PDF. Why do I have to engage in a little ruse.

anyways do you think Susan Walsh uses OpenRefine? I feel like she uses OpenRefine. Like I get why this book talks about data cleaning with Excel because it's a more widespread program but I parasocially believe she's knows it's the data cleaning GOAT

Text overlaying a series of three images of Gimli and Legolas from Lord of the Rings. Gimli: Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a procurement specialist. Legolas: How about with a fellow clean data afficianado? Gimli: Aye, I could do that.

a man in a hospital bed with the words will you come to my cottage this summer on the bottom Alt: a man in a hospital bed with the words will you come to my cottage this summer on the bottom

we'll have so much funnnn, we'll share so many data cleanup tips...we can nerd out about taxonomies...together~

Me @ Susan Walsh, author of Between the Spreadsheets: Classifying and Fixing Dirty Data (2nd edition): omg hiiiii susan. if you read this i am free to hang out thursday night, please hit me up if you wanna hang thursday night when i am free

feeling that my current book thoughts are too full of valuable literary analysis to be confined solely to whatsapp messages with the bestie. messages loading, stay tuned #pieReads26

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

Peter Coviello with another dynamite piece.

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Congrats to the fine folks at the Data Rescue Project on this well-deserved award--and huge thanks to their 900 volunteers who saved over 2500 datasets from over 90 government agencies in 2025.

rdapassociation.org/news/13593532

Donate to Honoring the life of Fobazi Ettarh: Funeral & other costs, organized by Ysabel Gerrard NEW UPDATE Dear readers, This isn’t the update I was … Ysabel Gerrard needs your support for Honoring the life of Fobazi Ettarh: Funeral & other costs

Fobazi's passing is heartbreaking. Her love for Elena was truly inspiring, and now Elena faces immense financial burdens. Please consider donating or sharing to help ease her stress during this difficult time. Thank you for your support.

www.gofundme.com/f/support-fo...

as a lover of tangents this would also be where i warn against the false promises of llms claiming they can clean your data...he is a fae creature and thou must guard thy tongue against treachery...only the experienced eye can see where monsieur chatty has NOT fixed truncated titles as claimed...

cue the story of the winter of my discontent (intensively cleaning up our digitized theses metadata and deduping records) to bring about the summer of our beautiful digitization project tracker dashboard

(58% of MPOW's historical theses collection is digitized baby!)

get em with the snazzy graphs and then be like SURPRISE! you gotta clean the data first to process it and it helps a lot if you've set up good data management practices first!

so anyways I think if I were -lupe fiasco voice- daydreaming~ about building out a suite of data services I'd probably go hard on data visualization first because it seems like the most recognizable carrot of the bunch

This is an Underground Railroad style operation. This is what I mean that we should study UR history, tactics, and strategy.

What is the POINT of this? Literally what value do you get of an AI response to a research question? Are we really at the point where survey tools just sell the ability to commit scientific fraud?

monsieur clifton put my top 5 strengths as ideation, strategic, responsibility, analytical, and arranger bee tee dubs. was mildly curious about the top 34 report but apparently that's even MORE money and like. it's not THAT fun a personality quiz lol

also w00t positivity but they should include more on potential pitfalls because i wasn't rly buying in until i read my analytical description about being perceived as unnecessarily critical and i was like okay, actually i do recognize that, i'm constantly caveating my questions to manage discomfort

there can be gaps between what you perceive as your values and what others see expressed! how heavily you should weigh one over the other is dependent on self-awareness, perception, etc. but like. there were quiz items where i was like well I know what I WANT to be true about me but is it really...?

so we're doing these cliftonstrengths assessments at MPOW and like. it's fun! we love a personality quiz! but i'm v curious if there's a version of these that involves external validation; like if you could have a coworker do it for you and see if they match

this is a stunning piece of data journalism/art/whatever.

Congratulations! So happy to see Mamdani surrounding himself with the best.

Congratulations! I'm partying for New York City tonight! 🎉

Y'all ever think about how there are people in this world who hear about millions going hungry and their response is 'we should be careful about helping, what if it discourages work?' 🙃

I've got to stop reading op-eds, I simply do not vibe with those who've surgically removed their humanity

I always thought catalogers were a different breed the way they lock into their work and now I'm an hour into tidying up metadata for a long-term ETD project and it turns out...it me. I was the different breed all along.

(What am I supposed to do though, just let messy data breed dupes freely???)

I must say, the front desk to our first library building was a distinguished looking fellow. I would share the archival photograph but u kno. That would move me further out of the zone of semi-anonymity I maintain this account within. This lady librarian is attached to her air of mystery.

A potential answer! Our first (Carnegie) library opened its doors in 1908. Perhaps the lack of a library building went hand in hand with a lack of a library? Where does one deposit a thesis when those who would curate your collections have not been hired?

Also one of the students involved in that project is a former library school colleague! The world is incredibly small space. Perhaps one day I shall ask him to speak on his memory of the halcyon days of 2011.

Sidebar! Once upon a decade ago the Internet speaks of a digital exhibit dedicated to the 50 year anniversary of MPOW! It has disappeared into the Internet either. The ephemerality of digital scholarship remains tragique. 🥲

Potential answers:

a) theses were simply not a thing at MPOW in 1895! It took them a lil bit to figure out how they wanted to tackle this graduate degree business!
b) the library was not ensuring they received copies of theses in 1895! it took them a lil bit to figure out this archiving business!

This message brought to you by me noticing that the first of the theses we have catalogued at MPOW dates to 1905 but our university awarded its first graduate degree in 1895. What happened in that intervening decade?