batch input?
Hi there,
First, I wanted to wish you all luck with this project. It's something that I've discussed with graduate students on occasion, but never really had the time/space/energy to begin myself, so I'm glad to see you all taking it on.
I spent a couple of hours today just inputting basic information about my home institution (UTArlington) and the one where I'm at (Syracuse), and i found myself performing a lot of repetitive operations, obviously. In the interests of getting a lot of basic info up on the site quickly, it might be worth targeting graduate directors (I've been DGS at SU) and/or doing basic data scrapes of the alumni pages of program websites.
As a DGS who just did a couple such scrapes, it would have made things a lot quicker if there was a way to do some sort of batch input of basic data: name, degree, graduation date. If a batch page isn't realistic, perhaps a page that could be entered via the institution page, with a 2-button option to "add another" or "complete submissions." Even if the degree-granting institution and date were available as part of the basic Add Person page, it would speed things up quite a bit. I might think too about doing radio buttons for Dr./Mr./Ms./etc and MA/PhD (with a textarea option for Other).
Anyhow, good luck again, and I hope you get lots of buzz at CCCC.
Collin Brooke
batch input
Great idea, Collin! It helps us to have the degree-granting institution as its own node with a relation to each person, but you're right that we should look into a mechanism for batch input of people related to the same institution -- and that we should reach out to program directors. We'll look into it, and see what modules already exist and what we might need to create. Thanks!