Hello everyone! I’m Sheila B. Robinson, Lead Curator and sometimes Saturday contributor. A few weeks back I was excited that we were approaching 4000 articles on AEA365. Well, we reached that milestone in the first week of March 2021.
I’ve always wanted to get a sense of how many people have contributed to this blog, but it’s a complex question, given the way we format titles and upload our articles.
Many of our contributors have submitted more than one article. Many articles are written by an individual, but many are contributed by 2-6 people.
Because I like playing in Excel, I downloaded all 4000 titles. There was no easy way to do the work and there were several challenges to isolating names from titles. One challenge was that a few years back we changed the way we format titles. We started with “Sheila B. Robinson on Title of the Article” and switched to “Title of the Article by Sheila B. Robinson.” This change made it easier to see the article title first on smaller devices. And let’s face it… lots of us just love long titles!
Another interesting challenge is that we all express our names differently. Some of use use two names and many use three and sometimes four names. Many of us use middle initials and some use a first initial. Several of us have changed the way we express our names (sometimes using a middle initial or middle name, and sometimes not). Many of us (myself included!) have changed our names over the years.
The data cleaning was particularly messy and there was little automation I could do to separate names from title words. It’s quite possible I lost a few names in the process and others I have in the list represent two names for the same person. It helps though, that I know so many of you and know your name variations and changes!
Lesson Learned:
I’m excited to report that we have had about 2525 unique contributors to our blog. Wow!
Here are some other fun facts:
- 159 people contributed 5 or more articles (11 of these have been AEA staff and curators).
- Our curators and top AEA staff contributors have been: John LaVelle, Susan Kistler, Michelle Baron, June Gothberg, Liz Zadnik, Sara Vaca, Dan McDonnell, Jayne Corso, Jessica Byrnes, Elizabeth DiLuzio and me.
- 44 people have contributed 10 or more articles (9 of these are AEA staff and curators)
- Outside of the curators (after all, it’s part of our job to contribute, so many of us have a lot to our names) Kylie Hutchinson has contributed the most – 35 articles!
- I’d love to extend a sincere THANK YOU to ALL 2500+ contributors! Here are those (excluding AEA staff and curators) who have gone above and beyond and contributed to 10 or more articles:
| Kylie Hutchinson |
| Michael Quinn Patton |
| Stephanie Evergreen |
| Ann K. Emery |
| Susan Wolfe |
| Johanna Morariu |
| Beverly Peters |
| Leah C. Neubauer |
| Dominica McBride |
| Vidhya Shanker |
| Asma M. Ali |
| Leah Goldstein Moses |
| Veronica Olazabal |
| Judy Savageau |
| David Fetterman |
| Linda Cabral |
| Lisa Aponte-Soto |
| Laura Beals |
| Laura Sefton |
| Jean A. King |
| Eric Barela |
| Humberto Reynoso-Vallejo |
| Grisel M. Robles-Schrader |
| David J. Bernstein |
| Bernadette Wright |
| Art Hernandez |
| Stanley Capela |
| Stephen Axelrad |
| Ryan Watkins |
| Nora F. Murphy |
| Matt Feldmann |
| Libby Smith |
| Krista Collins |
| Deven Wisner |
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Sheila I am absolutely blown away with how many articles there are and how truly determined you are to make sure every single one is accounted for. I love how passionate and enthusiastic you are about everything that you have found. Have you read every article there was? How did you manage to read all of those articles if you did? I also adore how you threw in extra fun small facts in addition to what you have already incurred.
Hello, Sheila! First off its awesome that you are this dedicated to the 365Blog that you took the time and learned a method to track down how many articles/ participants have been apart of this. You know whats funny tho? That in doing this you learned that articles went from name of author and then title to the title and then author and found it to be easier when formatted that way, all of which couldn’t be learned unless a program is evaluated. I am currently in an undergraduate class for program evaluations and out of everything Ive read, yes people can do a great job by just following the rules that a program will be its best when people follow the rules, codes, ethics, and morals but on top of that if they are passionate too! Which clearly you are!