Conferences and data analysis
Just a couple of days ago, a paper I was working on for quite a bit got published in Biosemiotics: Institutional Diversity and Geographic Inclusion at the Gatherings in Biosemiotics: Insights from Twenty-Five Years of Conferences. I wrote this paper together with my friend Yogi Hendlin, the chief editor of the journal (I myself am an associate editor). Because of my project, ECO-MINDS, I’ve been working on improving my knowledge and handling of R to analyze data, and this felt very worthwhile, as I’m also part of the board of the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies as their webmaster.
The idea of the paper was looking at the diversity of institutions represented throughout our conferences, the Gatherings in Biosemiotics. Compiling the data was rather tedious, but it wasn’t an outlandish amount of work and many of the former organizers helped me with documents when they could. And I know there’s still much more for me to learn statistics-wise, but this felt like a refreshing change of pace for me, doing a quantitative analysis for something I care about.
Sadly neither of our institutions covered open access—it’s too late in the year and most money for institutions paying for publications is gone—but I’m happy it’s already there!