Social Science sites of the week

Nelson Mandela Digital Archive Project launched.
Marvellous new resource created by Google in association with the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory to commemorate the life and political career of this great man. See the blog.
Features include photographs, letters written during imprisonment, draft manuscripts for his autobiography.
Other useful sites for full text documents on this period of South African history include the Freedom archives which have audio materials from the Black Panther party.

Senegal scrutiny vote 2012.
Useful site created by The Coalition of Civil Society Organizations for Elections (COSCE) in Senegal to monitor the conduct of the 2012 presidential elections. Funding has also been received from Oxfam and USAid. It makes use of OneWorld’s text message and mapping technology to publish findings on conduct and facilities at polling booths. The website has interactive mappings of districts indicating incidents and favourable/ unfavourable results from observers. Also accessible on the map are participation rates and text messages from observers. For other examples of sites offering background and current election coverage see our blog posting.

social media:Pinterest
A new social media site which has attracted a lot of interest recently is pin interest. Pinterest is a social photo sharing website that enables uses to pin items to a board and share them with others. However it has not been without controversy. e.g. see Washington College of law IP brief on legal issues. and Washington Post discussion. http://pinterest.com/ Find out more from the website.
However this has not stopped major newspapers using the site. This recent article discusses use by the Wall Street Journal, Time and Life magazine with links to examples. For background discussion on the uses of social media by journalists read this in-depth survey of opinion from Eurobarometer which as published at the start of 2012. It includes interviews with journalists from 27 European nations.
Also launched this month by the official campaign is Barack Obama Pinterest page. See the pet lovers for Obama feature!
And Europeana. which has materials from Europe’s national libraries.
Find out more news in these Guardian technology articles.

LSE Digital Library launches street life photography collection.
The latest online collection from the LSE Digital Library is a fascinating collection of street photographs. Based on a book by the radical journalist Adolphe Smith and the photographer John Thomson originally published (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, London, 1877). It includes images and commentary on London labour, life and the urban poor. A favourite example for those enjoying the warm weather this week is 19th century ice cream eating. Look at the description of the ice cream sellers ‘villainous-looking and dirty shops’. The Museum of London also has a large collection of street photography images. Browse the collections online. Note copyright.

Margaret Thatcher Foundation online papers
As mentioned in the press recently, the Foundation has released online private papers from former Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, from 1981 which include coverage of private discussion with Rupert Murdoch about his bid to buy the Times newspaper. The website also contains biographical information plus numerous online speeches and quotes.
The BBC archive also has a selection of BBC clips from her prime ministerial career. The Conservative Party Archive is based at the Bodleian library. Online resources include election campaign posters from 1877-2008

ABC open archives
Major Australian broadcaster ABC has released free of charge a number of its archives. It is collaborating with Wikimedia Commons to make content available under a Creative Commons license. This is the first time an Australian broadcaster has shared its archival content in this way. Content will be added on a rolling basis. At present very old snippetsare online. See this prediction by Arthur C Clarke on computing and the internet. 1974.
The LSE library delicious account has a moving image section which has links to a growing collection of other free historic film and documentary resources.

Language and Politics sub-committee of the International political Science Association launch website.
The website has updates of conferences, events and publications convering politics and language use. You can search for many online conference papers from this and other ipsa specialist groups on the online paper room. This has materials from 2006 onwards.
The Ipsa portal highlights and reviews the top 300 sites all political scientists should know about! Links include online data, organisations, Ejournals and more.

BBC listening project
Major new social project involving collaboration between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations, and the British Library.
It which aims to capture everyday conversations from the British public. These will then be archived providing a record of daily concerns and use of language in 2012.
The website has details about the project and a growing collection of materials. Browse by topic or region.

The World Bank Socio-Economic Database for Latin America and the CaribbeanMaintained by CEDLAS (Universidad Nacional de La Plata) Specialisms include poverty, trade and finance, education and health, millennium development goals,includes information from over 200 household surveys carried out in 25 countries: Argentina, Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. Most data covers 1980 onwards. The site also has a good selection of poverty maps for individual Latin American countries.

US Elections and African Americans
NACCP has declared that certain us states have introduced practices which are restricting black voting rights.
See the report Defending Democracy: Confronting Modern Barriers to Voting Rights in America.
See more about their campaign which is encouraging black political participation during the elections. The resources section has a collection of articles covering race and voting.
The Guardian has a data blog based on this which gives results state by state.

Obama launched in January a campaign specifically for African Americans. Dr Michael Fauntroy has a blog and website which regularly discuss race and the elections. The Pew research centre has some older materials on race and the American electorate.