Sapping Attention

(This is a post I've had unpublished since writing it in 2016. Just hitting publish without reviewing right now because it's something I find myself periodically looking at the charts for).
As we get ready to launch the full Hathi Trust+Bookworm to allow tracking words across 13 million books, I've been working on fixing up the metadata from the original MARC records....

I periodically write about Google Books here, so I thought I'd point out something that I've noticed recently that should be concerning to anyone accustomed to treating it as the largest collection of books: it appears that when you use a year constraint...

I did a slightly deeper dive into data about the salaries by college majors while working on my new Atlantic article on the humanities crisis. As I say there, the quality of data about salaries by college major has improved dramatically in the last ...

Back in 2013, I wrote a few blog post arguing that the media was hyperventilating about a "crisis" in the humanities, when, in fact, the long term trends were not especially alarming. I made two claims them: 1. The biggest drop in humanities degrees...