social science sites of the week
here is this week’s round of the latest new and recommended social science websites. Keep up to date with more on our blog at: http://lselibraryresearch.blogspot.com/
The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian RevolutionsA recently published article in the International Journal of Communications examines the production and dissemination of news on Twitter during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. The authors use these two events to discuss how Twitter plays a key role in amplifying and spreading information across the globe. Authors are: Gilad Lotan, Social Flow,Erhardt Graeff, Web Ecology Project,Mike Ananny, Microsoft Research,Devin Gaffney, Web Ecology Project,Ian Pearce, Web Ecology Project,Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research. The website provides information on the methodology used and visualizations.
Big Innovation Centre
Launched by the Work Foundation and Lancaster University in September 2011. Chair is Will Hutton. It aims to bring together researchers and the commercial world to create a centre for business orientated research. The website provides information about the aims of the Centre. It also offers free access to its research reports on how to encourage innovation in the Uk economy. There is also a data lab section which has facts and figures about the Uk economy http://www.biginnovationcentre.com/Datalab
JSTOR Early Journal content now freeJSTOR has made freely accessible journal content from items published before 1870 (UK) and 1923 (USA) this covers nearly 500,000 articles from more than 200 journals. Subject coverage includes economics, politics, humanities titles.
To locate the free materials see this free video tutorial The easiest way to do this is to go to the advanced search form and tick include only content I can access then search. On the results list early content is marked with a green tick symbol.
Hacking the academy
Access the full text of this new book released by MPublishing, the publishing division of the University of Michigan Library. An interesting example of a book which was produced from crowd sourced content sent in over one week. It covers ways in which ‘the academy’ and university study can be positively transformed using new technology. Entries are short observations, sharing the of experiences from contributors.
Topics covered include blogging, open access publishing, twitter at conferences, and new styles of teaching On a similar theme the online college has listed a few quick ideas for libraries on how to use ipads
World Wide web index
New project of the World Wide web foundation supported by Google which aims to provide a measure of the size of the web and its impact on peoples worldwide. The first annual index will be launched in 2012. the website currently has information about the aims of the project.
Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), a research consultancy from the Social Disadvantage Research Centre at the University of Oxford have created this new app. The app offers local data on the economy, education, health, crime and other topics and allows comparisons to be made with regional and national trends. The service has been launched as an iPhone app, with Android and Blackberry versions to follow. A free version offers 11 headline indicators, with a paid-for version (£2.99 — time limited introductory offer £1.49) adding 70 more across 10 themes, with monthly updates:
Of course a useful website for this is neighbourhood statistics which offers free graphs
Reading the riots study
the Guardian, The LSE in association with the Joseph Rowntree foundation are investigating the British summer riots of 2011. The Guardian website has a timeline, interviews and writings. It also includes a section on data relating to the riots and rioters.
The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
Has launched an open access archive that includes more than 200,000 pages, 300 reels of audio tape, 300 museum artifacts, 72 movie reels, and 1,500 photos. They include materials relating to his assassination, and Cuba Bay of Pigs incident. The latter includes documents and contemporary telephone recordings.
Digital library of Sardinia
Sardegna Digital Library An ongoing project to create a digital archive of material related to the history and culture of this autonomous region of Italy. The available material is organized into four categories; video, image, text, and audio. A variety of different content includes images, newspapers. Historic maps documents from the archive Materials in Italian, searchable by keyword
Paddi.net
paddi (planning architecture design database Ireland) is produced in collaboration by the Libraries of Queen’s University Belfast and University College Dublin. It is a bibliographic database which aims to provide wide access to information on all aspects of the built environment and environmental planning in Ireland (north and south). Indexing of material began in 1980 some materials are older. While focusing primarily on architecture and planning, this database is of value to s scientists seeking document son social housing, urban renewal and town planning. Documents indexed include books, journal articles.
