About The Soundbite University Report

Kalev Leetaru

Kalev H. Leetaru has worked in the area of news, internet and information technologies for 15 years, founding his first web company in 1995, holds three US patents and 50 university invention disclosures, and has worked extensively with industry and government on understanding global information flows about their organizations and industries. His research focuses on the role of the news media in how we understand the world around us and working with issues such as the effects of sourcing patterns, geography, cultural contextualization, and translation on news content.

Leetaru's work has appeared in such popular press as Fortune Magazine, the New York Times, MSNBC, US News & World Report, and Que Leer. Many of his studies involve the use of "big data" techniques to characterize and understand information sources, such as the first unclassified thirty-year historical retrospective of the CIA's global news monitoring service, an in-depth look at the evolution of the one of the oldest "blogs", New Media vs Old Media: A Portrait of the Drudge Report 2002-2008, and a technical comparison of Google Books and the Open Content Alliance. He is also the co-founder of the Carbon Capture Report, one of the most widely-used resources for global news on climate change and the energy industry, with subscribers in more than 80 countries.

In a forthcoming study in the Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, he constructed the first line-level merged IPEDS and HEGIS degree conferral dataset spanning 40 years of higher education degree awards in the United States. Using a custom-built large-computing statistical environment, every crosswise relationship was extracted from the entire dataset, resulting in a set of novel findings regarding the role institutional type plays in the engineering environment for women.

Paul Magelli

Paul J. Magelli, Sr. earned bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in economics from the University of Illinois and holds an honorary Doctor of Law, honoris causa, from the University of Bristol, U.K., where he helped establish the Bristol Enterprise Centre. He was awarded a Ford Foundation Fellowship and was named to the first class of American Council of Education (ACE) Fellows.

Magelli has held numerous positions within higher education, serving as dean of the Fairmount College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wichita State University, vice president for academic affairs at Drake University, president of Metropolitan State College of Denver, and president of Parkland College. At the University of Illinois he has served as an assistant dean of the MBA program, assistant dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, associate dean and director of budgets and visiting professor of economics. Currently, he is the Senior Director of the Academy for Entrepreneurial Leadership Development and founder and Executive Director of Illinois Business Consulting at the University of Illinois College of Business. In addition, Magelli is also the President of the National Council of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CCAS). He has helped raise nearly $50 million from various foundations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 1999, he received the University of Illinois Chancellor's Distinguished Service Award for his decades-long service of excellence at the University.

I-CHASS and NCSA

The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications provided the hosting and computational support for this project.

Proquest Corporation

ProQuest provides seamless access to and navigation of more than 125 billion digital pages of the world's scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts, literature, and social science to general reference, business, science, technology, and medicine.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers is the definitive digital newspaper archive, offering full-text and full-image articles for significant newspapers dating back to the 18th Century. As part of the ProQuest Historical Newspapers program, every issue of each title includes the complete paper cover-to-cover, with full-page and article images in easily downloadable PDF format. Digitizing The New York Times, from the first issue in 1851, involved scanning, digitizing, zoning and editing over 3.4 million pages from microfilm into digital files.