What did I do this year?

June 17, 2013

180+ notes

I've mentioned before that I keep a professional journal as a quick way to keep tabs on the projects I'm doing and what I should be focusing on. It takes the form of a 3-part note in Evernote: Done, To Do, and Backburner.

My annual evaluation is coming up, for which I have to write a self-evaluation summarizing all the things I did this year. It's hard to slow down and think big-picture, and it's hard to remember what exactly my priorities were last fall when I'm so caught up in what I'm doing now.

Output as HTML

To get a jump-start, I wrote a tiny Python script to iterate through my notes (exported to HTML). Using BeautifulSoup to climb the trees of my messy and non-standardized notes, it lists out all the things I marked "Done" since September.

I fed the plain text into Voyant Tools, "a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts." It's probably more interesting and helpful if you use a larger text, but my 8,900-word text had analyses of interest too.

Word cloud using Cirrus in Voyant Tools. Stopwords: Taporware & names of colleagues

Some of these aren't so surprising. Oh, really, I went to lots of meetings and sent lots of emails? But it's also easy to see that my priorities for most of the year centered on building the new library website (usability, git, drupal, database) with some side projects thrown in (signs, guides, newsletter, IA).

Here are the word frequency data from Voyant for words occurring more than 25 times (stop words included):

Words in the Entire Corpus. Corpus Term Frequencies provides an ordered list for all the terms' frequencies appearing in a corpus. As well additional columns can be toggled to show other statistical information, including a small line graph for term frequency across the corpus.

Voyant Tools, Stéfan Sinclair & Geoffrey Rockwell (©2013) Privacy v. 3.0 beta (4583)

word count z-score mean to 286 23.51 321.1 and 241 19.77 270.6 with 205 16.77 230.2 for 178 14.52 199.9 about 155 12.60 174.0 on 131 10.60 147.1 the 96 7.69 107.8 in 92 7.36 103.3 up 81 6.44 90.9 of 79 6.27 88.7 bonnie 72 5.69 80.8 meeting 59 4.61 66.2 sent 59 4.61 66.2 a 54 4.19 60.6 page 53 4.11 59.5 new 47 3.61 52.8 talked 47 3.61 52.8 email 43 3.27 48.3 emailed 43 3.27 48.3 mandy 43 3.27 48.3 ref 41 3.11 46.0 desk 40 3.02 44.9 all 38 2.86 42.7 blog 36 2.69 40.4 out 36 2.69 40.4 at 35 2.61 39.3 will 35 2.61 39.3 made 34 2.53 38.2 site 34 2.53 38.2 library 32 2.36 35.9 from 31 2.28 34.8 met 31 2.28 34.8 it 30 2.19 33.7 usability 30 2.19 33.7 be 29 2.11 32.6 signs 29 2.11 32.6 1 28 2.03 31.4 is 28 2.03 31.4 marta 28 2.03 31.4 post 28 2.03 31.4 database 27 1.94 30.3 faculty 27 1.94 30.3 more 27 1.94 30.3 not 27 1.94 30.3 test 27 1.94 30.3 2 26 1.86 29.2 added 25 1.78 28.1 asked 25 1.78 28.1 drupal 25 1.78 28.1 fixed 25 1.78 28.1

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Word counts aren't the whole story, obvs, but it's a good place to start for my self-evaluation!