Tooting Our Own Horn and Other Updates

Loyal followers of the blog have surely noticed a sharp decline in the number of blog posts in recent months, for which we are truly sorry and attempting to remedy the situation. We do, however, have some pretty good excuses for why we've been turning a blind eye to your plight.

We've been busy.

But with another academic year in the books, we hope to ramp up activity on the blog and give you all plenty of maps to keep you feeling cool throughout the summer. But first, we thought we'd fill you in on some of the happenings that have kept us away from the blogosphere this year...

In addition to spending the year in Estonia on a Fulbright, our fearless leader Matt has been busy getting promoted to full Professor at the University of Kentucky. Matt has also been named co-editor of Big Data and Society, a new journal that will surely have some Floatingsheep research within its (wholly digital) pages before too long. Ate was also recently announced as an assistant editor for the journal!

Not to be outdone by Matt's promotional prowess, Mark also a received a promotion to Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the OII, and became a Research Fellow at Oxford's Green Templeton College; and Monica has decided to take up a new post as Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University at Buffalo this fall.

Mark has also recently been awarded a five-year ERC grant to put together a team of three full-time researchers to study 'knowledge economies' in Sub-Saharan Africa. He's building a website for the project at the moment, but you can read more about it in the meantime here.  

The only ones of us left plodding through graduate school, both Ate and Taylor have reached ABD status in recent months, with only the dread of a dissertation ahead of them. They have, however, found the time to buy a house and move back to the Bluegrass from Massachusetts, respectively.

And while there have been too many publications and presentations to list (toot! toot!), we're also pleased to announce that Mark and Matt's paper on the geolinguistic contours of the web has been named the winner of the Ashby Prize, awarded annually to the best paper published in the journal Environment and Planning A.

We hope you'll all forgive us neglected the blog recently due to these happenings. We promise to do (at least a little) better.