Michael Neault reads and posts about information design, and has recently posted articles by Quartz Media and Wired about content suggestion algorithms for Spotify and Netflix. Loic Tallon's posts are primarily professional and focus on digital design and the information commons. Tallon is the historical producer of Museums and Mobile Online Conference, and is a current member and past president of Museum Computer Network (MCN). All of Jeffrey Stean's social media accounts are heavily restricted to the public and offer no information about his reading preferences or habits, and an extensive search revealed no third-party information available in public resources which contained useful information about his reading.
Below you will find general methodology notes, our methodology relative to how we assessed level of reading interest or preference for each individual, and why certain fields in the spreadsheet were marked 'n/a.' All relevant information has been entered into the provided spreadsheet.
METHODOLOGY
For this request, we have researched sources in the online public domain which are most likely to give information about an individual's reading preferences, subscriptions, and activity, namely social media accounts which focus on written content (primarily LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter) and interview articles. Please note that all social media accounts for Stean are either minimally managed, or public visibility is heavily restricted. Please also note that there was a consistent lack of information available, across all sources, indicating any individual's motivation for reading.
FREQUENCY OF READING/FAVORITE COLUMNISTS
We attempted to determine the frequency of reading a given publication based on frequency of posting. However, the very small pool of available reading content in the past two years for each individual presents insufficient information from which to make a reasonable assessment of how frequently these individuals read a given publication. Due to this limited amount of information and the predominance of single-source posting (i.e., a given source is only posted once), there was also insufficient comparative information on which to make an assessment of favorite columnists or contributors.
TYPES OF CONTENT OF INTEREST was determined by a composite analysis of posts on available social media accounts and personal websites, including social media accounts which have limited or no written content (ex: Pinterest). This inclusion was based on the assumption that Pins, Instagram photos, website material, etc., shine a light on those subjects of 'greatest interest' among the written content posted in other social media accounts.
INDUSTRY ASSOCIATIONS were determined from LinkedIn association activity and corroborated by third-party articles or websites (such as the Museums and Mobile Online Conference for Tallon, which indicates that the last conference was held in 2013).
LOIC TALLON
Please note that Tallon's Facebook and LinkedIn account public posts are privacy-restricted and offer no information about his reading preferences. His Twitter account contains a limited number of professional posts within the past two years, the most useful of which were November and December 2017 Digital Reading Lists compiled by Tallon. These lists represent "articles that inspire/inform/challenge my thinking about digital practices." Based on these lists, we can surmise that Tallon's key professional interest, based on available sources, is digital design. Of the articles included in this list, only Medium is sourced more than once, for which reason it is included in the spreadsheet.
Based on the comparative prevalence of Wikimedia mentions in the overall Twitter feed, we can also surmise that Wikimedia is a key sub-segment of interest for Tallon relative to the digital information commons. For this reason, it has been included in the spreadsheet. Hyperallergic was also included based on Tallon's comparatively high (two) posts of Hyperallergic articles in the past year.
No other publication or topic of interest could be determined to be of greater interest than any other, for which reason the fourth field was left blank.
JEFFREY STEAN
Information about Stean's reading habits is not available in any format in the public domain. His Facebook and LinkedIn accounts are privacy-restricted, and his Twitter account has no activity. There were no third-party interviews or articles on Stean discovered in our research, even when cross-referenced with the Cleveland Museum of Art. For this reason, all fields have been entered as 'n/a.'
MICHAEL NEAULT
Please note that no Facebook account was found which could be definitely linked to Neault. Based on his Twitter and LinkedIn posts for the past year, we can surmise the following: - the majority of his posts are related to digital media or digital art experience, in some way;
- all of his posts are professionally-related;
- the majority of written content (versus audio or visual content) is media coverage of exhibits, or awards for exhibits, at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Neault posted multiple articles from Medium on both LinkedIn and Twitter, all of which covered the Art Institute or its exhibits. For this reason, we have entered Medium as the primary publication of (professional) interest.
Neault's Pinterest account contains a significant level of pins related to information design, maps and museum maps, which we can reasonably assume represent personal interests. His personal portfolio website supports this assessment of maps, cartography and information design as key points of interest. As nearly all his Twitter/LinkedIn posts are single-source, we have cross-referenced this indication of personal interest with the subjects of the single-source posts to determine those articles which are the most relevant to Neault's interests, namely articles about content suggestion algorithms by Wired and Quartz Media, and a ScienceMag article on data visualization.
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up: both Tallon and Neault read about information design and digital design, and both have posted several Medium articles in the past year. Information on Stean's reading habits is completely unavailable in the public domain.