Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Who are the #hackacad contributors?

If you've missed it, Hacking the Academy (#hackacad) has just finished its 1 week call for content. The project, initiated by Drs. Scheinfeldt and Cohen at the Center for History & New Media at George Mason University, is an attempt to crowdsource enough good content to create a book in a single week.

As I mentioned on Twitter, the project attracted approximately 190 different authors who contributed almost 330 entries. 90 of the entries were written specifically for Hacking the Academy, while the remainder were old posts, videos or presentations that authors felt fit the mandate of the planned book.

The project is now into its second phase: reorganizing the ~330 entries into manageable groups and whittling down the number to something that might be publishable.

I was curious who the contributors were and where they came from, so I went digging.

I was able to tie 133 of the 180 to an institution with the help of Google and all those C.V.s people have on their blogs. I'm sure it's not 100% accurate, but it is probably good enough to give a rough idea. The graph shows the number of posts by institution, including all schools with 4 or more posts (click to see full size):



I probably should have also included group blogs such as University of Venus (14 posts) and Professor Hacker (7 posts). The chart shows the folks at CHNM definitely got on the bandwagon, which is great. But, at least in the first draft, one might suggest the entries are geographically...biased. I guess that's what happens when entrants are self-selected.

Stay tuned for another chart when the final version comes out.