Verbs Analysis for the code4lib Study Carrel — What Do People Do?

The verb data from the code4lib carrel is extraordinarily rich — over a thousand distinct lemmatized verbs, ranging from nearly 69,000 occurrences of "have" down to single appearances. By grouping the most frequent and thematically significant verbs into clusters, a vivid picture emerges of what this community does.

Foundational Verbs of Existence and Cognition

These top verbs suggest a community that is simultaneously reflective (think, know, understand, believe) and action-oriented (work, do, make, build, create, implement).

Cluster 1: Building, Creating, and Implementing

This is the heart of the code4lib community — people make things.

The community builds, configures, deploys, and integrates library technology systems. This is not a community that merely discusses technology — it produces technology.

Cluster 2: Managing, Organizing, and Administering

These verbs reveal the managerial and administrative dimension of library technology work — the day-to-day business of keeping systems running and teams functioning.

Cluster 3: Sharing, Communicating, and Collaborating

The high frequency of thank, welcome, and appreciate is striking. This is a community that not only works together but actively expresses gratitude — a hallmark of healthy professional discourse.

Cluster 4: Searching, Finding, and Discovering

These verbs reflect the information-retrieval and problem-solving orientation of library technologists — they are perpetually searching, finding, and discovering.

Cluster 5: Learning, Teaching, and Helping

The community is not only self-educating but actively invested in educating others — through workshops, mentoring, and training.

Cluster 6: Conference and Community Organizing

These verbs confirm the vibrant organizational life of code4lib — an annual conference with proposals, voting, keynotes, and active community governance.

Cluster 7: Cataloging, Metadata, and Data Work

This cluster reveals the technical data work that underpins library operations — from cataloging and digitization to format conversion, metadata harvesting, and database querying.

Cluster 8: Evaluating, Assessing, and Improving

The community is constantly evaluating, improving, and fixing — a cycle of assessment and enhancement that keeps library systems evolving.

Cluster 9: Preserving, Protecting, and Securing

These verbs point to the stewardship responsibilities of library technologists — not just building systems but ensuring their long-term viability and security.

Notable Colorful and Community-Specific Verbs

Beyond the high-frequency workhorses, the verb list contains many colorful, community-specific actions that give the corpus personality:

• hack (452), tinker (135), tweak (243), futz (48), fiddle (75), munge (55) — the informal vocabulary of people who work closely with code
• lurk (191) — the mailing list behavior of reading without posting
• unsubscribe (250) — the inevitable companion of active mailing lists
• spam (469) — a persistent concern on any mailing list
• phish (337) — a security threat the community discusses
• crowdsource (153) — a method the community experiments with
• geocode (162), digitize (1,859), transcribe (201) — specialized digital library activities
• migrate (1,077) — the ever-present challenge of moving between systems
• reimagine (64), reinvent (166), rethink (138) — verbs of creative reinvention
• demystify (224), elucidate (145), democratize (30) — aspirational verbs that reveal the community's values

What Do People in This Carrel Do?

Taken together, the verbs tell a compelling story. The people in the code4lib carrel are a community of library technologists who:

1. Build and create — they develop software, write code, implement systems, design architectures, and deploy applications
2. Manage and maintain — they oversee infrastructure, support users, administer services, and coordinate teams
3. Share and collaborate — they post, send, contribute, discuss, and — remarkably often — thank and appreciate one another
4. Search and discover — they find information, investigate problems, explore new tools, and identify solutions
5. Learn and teach — they constantly learn new technologies while mentoring, training, and educating others
6. Organize conferences — they propose talks, submit papers, vote, register, present, and volunteer at community events
7. Work with data — they catalog, digitize, archive, preserve, harvest, parse, query, convert, and transform information
8. Evaluate and improve — they test, debug, fix, optimize, and refine their systems in a continuous cycle of enhancement
9. Protect and preserve — they secure, backup, encrypt, and authenticate to ensure the long-term stewardship of digital content

In short, the people in this carrel make things, fix things, share things, find things, teach things, organize events, and take care of data — all in service of libraries and the communities they serve. The verbs reveal not just what library technologists do, but how they do it: with curiosity, collaboration, gratitude, and a healthy dose of tinkering.