So, I spent almost the whole of last weekend working on a new version of my CV in prep for the Digital Media job in the school of education at Madison that’s due at the end of this week. I figured, for a digital media position, I really should finally act on this desire to do something different, inspired by a couple of years of seeing really cool visualized resumes and such. For example, here’re my visualize.me and my What About Me? results:

For the CV, I’ve been told that search committees are interested in productivity over time, so I thought that a nice timeline would clearly show my rate of producing academic writing. Initially, I played around with an actual timeline with boxes highlighting different works. Here’s a first draft:

A couple of my twitter and Facebook friends (thanks esp. to Miriam Rigby, Jeremy Hunsinger, and Aaron Hertzmann) expressed concern over the colors since people may be printing the CV out and/or may be color blind. It was also a pain to refer back to the key a couple of pages in.

So, I rethought it, dividing publications and presentations into their own columns and moving job experience back outside of the timeline:

This was better, but many twitter and Facebook friends thought that it had the opposite of it’s intended effect: to make it easily scannable and understood quickly. The main reason being that the tradition of CVs has been around so long and is such a strong genre that academics can already scan them quickly so long as they appear in a familiar format. Yet, I felt like my old CV was too much a “wall of text.” Observe my old CV:

But okay.. I can still play around with this, break it up a bit, maybe with images. Also, another healthy discussion on Facebook led me to The Professor Is In’s rules for CVs (thanks Marcella Szablewicz), which led me to re-sort the parts by peer-review order. IE. put the stuff that took the most to accomplish first. Academic appointments are highly sought after and should go first, followed by books, journal articles, presentations, etc. The items in each subsequent section are easier to do; put the hardest stuff first. Made sense:

But this didn’t solve the very first concern that instigated this whole process: How to display dates quickly? TL Taylor suggested I finally ditch APA format for the references and just put dates first:

I like it. But I concede that the images don’t add *that* much to it. TL also pointed out that the links show up in weird boxes on her Mac, which is a huge cause for concern. Let’s assume people will be printing the CV out. The standard CV for them should have no issues with images nor weird boxes showing up around hyperlinks that don’t work on paper anyway:

And for people who are online as they read the CV, they can either use this one with links or just go to my CV and Writings pages on this website…

Funny how, after all that, I almost made it full circle back to the original CV! All that’s different is a change in font, smaller margins, ditch APA format to put dates first, and reordering to put what’s important first.

Here’re the final PDFs:

• Mark Chen CV
• Mark Chen CV with working hyperlinks
• Mark Chen CV with images
• Mark Chen CV with images and working hyperlinks