Map of jobs for economists
Posted in economics, visualization on October 31st, 2009 by Michael Ewens – 2 CommentsThe 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.
UPDATE: This service may make this process a bit easier, produce cleaner maps and allow the incorporation of more information.
Maybe the AEA can follow these directions to produce these maps after this year. Contact me with any suggestions or questions.
