UPDATE

My server is currently having difficulties accessing the AEJMC RSS feed, so the visualization is not being updated. I’m reaching out to AEJMC to see if that problem can be resolved.

I’m on the academic job market this year, which means regularly checking AEJMC Classifieds and the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Vitae, among other places, for new positions. (Know of an interesting opening? Contact me!) While geography is not a primary consideration for me, it is for some of my colleagues and I could not help but wonder where most of these postings were coming from. The result of that curiosity is an interactive, auto-updating visualization of all of the job postings on the AEJMC website. (Note: It is best viewed on a desktop or tablet device.)

As I suspected, most of the opportunities announced thus far are in the eastern half of the country (as of writing). (What’s the hold-up in the Midwest? The Northwest is also looking pretty sparse.) I hope to see more opportunities emerge in the coming weeks, although I’m intrigued by a handful of very promising propositions that have already emerged.

Result:

Data

Data and Source Code

All data were collected by me by first scraping the AEJMC Classifieds website and then regularly polling its RSS feed to identify new positions. These data populate an internal SQLite database that is periodically (hourly) accessed to create a custom data file used to power this visualization. (Because each data point on the map represents a school, and each school may have multiple job postings on the site, it is necessary to nest the data in the final dataset.) The name of the institution is subsequently geocoded using Google Maps (specifically, the neat py-googlemaps library). All code for acquiring and processing the data can be obtained here (coming soon).

The actual visualization is powered by the fantastic D3.js library, with a small touch of jQuery. Initially, I was just going to make a simple visualization during my lunch break, which then grew into an interactive one that listed the ads, and then grew into something that allowed for basic searching of the ads. Consequent to that, the code is a little sloppy in places, but is functional and (partly) documented. All code for creating the map and displaying the data can be obtained here (coming soon).

Limitations

The AEJMC Classifieds website is just a single source of job postings (though particularly useful for those in the area of journalism). Several postings, therefore, may appear on other websites and not AEJMC’s. Check out the Chronicle of Higher Ed’s Vitae and the Communication and Media Studies Wikia page for more opportunities. Also, the update mechanism is automated (unmonitored) and relies on third parties, so there may be errors in scraping and geocoding information. Finally, only jobs in the United States are mapped. There are, of course, many opportunities outside the U.S., although these are few and far between on AEJMC’s website.