Aug. 2nd, 2012

dr_whom: (Default)
Ooh, apparently there's a page where I can view statistics on why and when people have downloaded my dissertation and certain other papers.

I uploaded my dissertation in December 2009. The two biggest months for downloads of my dissertation have been February 2010 and April 2012. Both of these are a little bit later than I would have expected the spikes to be. The February 2010 one I can explain away—well, it came out at the end of December, but people who might wanted to read it didn't hear about it immediately and didn't get around to downloading it until February. The April 2012 one I find harder to explain—I would have expected a spike in February 2012, when I was giving job talks and therefore being evaluated and whatnot. By April 2012 my job-application cycle was over for the year.

The most common search term that people found my dissertation with is "boundary in phonology". Oops—although my dissertation is about "dialect boundaries and phonological change", it has absolutely nothing to do with boundaries in phonological structure, and I feel a little bad for people who downloaded my dissertation hoping to find something about them.

The most surprising search term that led to a download of my dissertation was "standards and vernaculars walt wolfman and natalie schilling estes". I have no explanation for this. That's apparently a chapter from a sociolinguistics textbook, but I don't cite it in my dissertation. The misspelling of Walt Wolfram's name is charming, though. (Wait a minute—could my dissertation have turned up on this search term because I cited a blog post by [livejournal.com profile] neil_werewolf?)

Five people downloaded my dissertation after searching on [livejournal.com profile] midnight_sidhe's name.

The most precisely on-target search term for any paper I've written is "pronunciation of of 'elementary' in rochester ny". Glad I was able to help you learn about that, whoever! The vaguest is "linguistic define"—not sure my paper resolved that question very well. The least relevant is "merger of adjacent lots in ontario": sorry, Canadian urban-planning people; hope you eventually found what you were looking for!

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