Apr 1, 2007

Friday Notes

by Cliopatria

Scott Jaschik's"New Way to Rank Ph. D. Programs," Inside Higher Ed, 30 March, looks at Geoff Davis's serious alternative to the U.S. News & World Report rankings. It avoids absolutizing any rank order and allows you to weight the importance of particular data. The site for phds.org is here. You can set priorities for a ranking of history departments here. It does not yield rankings of particular fields within history.

Yale's Sage Ross looks at the recent history of Wikipedia and thinks he sees a watershed.

Jackson Lears,"Money Changes Everything, TNR Online, 29 March, reviews David Nasaw's Andrew Carnegie and David Cannadine's Mellon. Hat tip.

The Organization of American Historians is meeting in Minneapolis. Here's the convention program. HNN's Rick Shenkman reports on Day One.

More Comments:

Danny Loss - 3/30/2007

It turns out that phds.org is now utilizing new data sources. So while the interface is largely the same as before, it looks as if it draws on much more useful info.

Danny Loss - 3/30/2007

The rankings at phds.org have been there for almost ten years, as the About phds.org page says. Maybe the funding from the Sloan foundation is new?