Map of jobs for economists
The AEA’s JOE postings present the near-population of jobs available for newly-minted economic PhDs. I used the XML data available for download to create a mash-up of job locations on Google Maps. I break the posting down into US full-time academic, international full-time academic and non-academic. Here is how I create the maps: 
- Select the subset of the data you want (e.g. US academic) and download the XML file.
- Fix some validation errors: take out the “<” and “>” within the text of nodes (I use TextMate for this).
- Parse the XML file with a custom PHP script that creates a csv file with school, position, location and url to posting. Here is my simple script for the academic XML file.
- Save the csv file produced by the script in step 3 as an Excel spreadsheet (Google Docs doesn’t like csv’s). Add a “Latitude” and “Longitude” column to the spreadsheet.
- Upload the Excel file to Google docs.
- Follow these directions to populate the latitude and longitude of each position+location.
- Publish the Google spreadsheet and save the unique id in the url that Google gives you.
- Sign up for a Google Maps API account.
- Follow these directions to produce a Google map of your postings.
Maybe the AEA can follow these directions to produce these maps after this year. Contact me with any suggestions or questions.