social science sites of the week

This week: Titanic commemorations
In the news this week the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. see our quick links to news and commemorative resources.
Titanic: 100 Years Later Virginia Newspaper Project
Useful website which examines media coverage of the tragedy using historic American and British newspapers from 1912. Topics covered include: headlines, misleading coverage and editorial cartoons. Original scanned images are provided. The site also has some references for further reading.

French Presidential elections.
La présidentielle vue d’ailleurs: dessins de presse,
Courrier Internationale
Really interesting news site which has commentary, headlines, analysis and cartoons from leading newspapers worldwide who provide a foreign commentary on the 2012 French presidential elections.
Newspapers covered include: e Corriere della Sera (Italie), La Nación (Argentine), la RTBF (Belgique), The Hindu (Inde), ABC (Espagne), Visão (Portugal), etc. Note all articles and commentary have been translated into French.
For more commentary see.
See our quick listing of good sites.

World Bank Open Knowledge repository
Great news this week that the World Bank is providing free open access to many of its influential publications and reports. From a single website the open Knowledge repository
See the open access policy statement
It currently includes books, journals, and data see the listing of key publications or search by title, subject keyword. Copyright information is displayed on the website.
There is a separate data site which enables visualisations.
The World Bank covers a wide range of areas. Particularly useful are the world development reports,there is also coverage of economics, education, development and the environment.

World Economic Forum launch the Global Information Technology report 2012
This measures the measures the extent to which 142 economies use ICT and other new technologies to increase their growth and well-being.
See the rankings and essays which discuss the impact on working life.
There is also a separate data platform.

Tell Dave protests
This month to protest new internet monitoring plans twitter users utilised hashtag #TellDaveEverything. The protest took the form of listing mundane events that they thought they should tell the prime minister about To make the point that the new laws would ‘snoop into everything’. see coverage from CBC Canada which has captured examples.
There are other examples of protest emails if you search #telldaveeverything

Give it back George – drop the charity tax.
Another example of a topical internet campaign site,
This graphic explains the origins of the campaign in relation to caps on charitable giving announced in the 2012 budget by Chancellor George Osborne.
Supporters include the Charities Aid Foundation and the National Council for Voluntary Organizations (NCVO)
For further access to research on charitable giving in the UK try these resources.
Charities Aid foundation publishes UK giving behaviour can also be compared in the World Giving index Think tank New Philanthropy Capital provides free access to many of its reports discussing how charities can make themselves more effective. NCVO has commentary on UK charity policy and regulation. Search the Third Sector Knowledge portal to find some interesting examples of publications and reports relating to charitable giving in the uk.If you haven’t tried it before this is a great new resource maintained by Developed by TSRC (Third sector research centre) and the British Library with Big Lottery Fund support.

Geppal Maintained by the Interamerican Bank and IDEA International. It provides access to an online database with information about women’s political participation in Latin America. It contains the results of surveys from 94 political parties with tables for candidates and participation in party politics. Data collected
15 of January and the 15 of October of 2009
All information is in Spanish. IDEA has also recently published a report on the findings which you can download. For those interested in women’s political participation a key site is IPU (Interparliamentary Union) which has a women in politics website

Mayor4London.com
A new app designed by Designed by Dr Nick Anstead, of the Department of Media and Communication, at LSE, Dr Mario Mendez, from the School of Law, at Queen Mary, and Dr Jonathan Wheatley at the e-Democracy centre, University of Zurich, which aims to encourage voters in the London Mayor elections to get involved by comparing candidates. Answer questions and create personal profiles then compare your results with others.
Coming soon other key sites for the elections so watch out for the coming coverage.

CGIAR Virtual information centre.
The Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in research for sustainable development. Its virtual information centre enables users to cross search leading databases cross search databases to get access to information on a full range of agricultural and food topics. These include scientific information on crops, but also food security, collective action and property rights, databases cross searched include free websites, bibliographic indexes. Note that some are password protected. Examples include ELDIS, World Bank library resources; note that some resources have restricted access. Note that on some occasions cross search does not seem to work the list of databases also offers a useful directory of links to the individual databases.

Alternatives in print directory.
Free online directory of alternative periodicals and book publishers produced by the Alternative Press Center. It defines alternative in these terms ‘The APBNA (Alternative Publishers of Books in North America) presses meet the following criteria for inclusion in the database. Book titles and content must have a political left orientation — for example, sustainable development, punk, social justice, gender studies, race relations, Third World studies, anarchism, or alternative globalization. Publishers are located in the United States or Canada, or are international presses with distribution channels in North America. Presses are independent of corporate or conglomerate ownership, or if an imprint of another publisher, has control over content. Publishers are currently active in publishing.’
Entries give descriptions, contact address and some basic information on circulation.

Statewatch archive of EU justice and home affairs documents launched
This contains over 4,500 official documents (rising to over 6,500 by the end of 2012) covering the period 1976-2000
Information on the official EU site register currently covers only
The Semdoc observatory Documents EU decision-making in the field of justice and home affairs policy. It has specialist section s on criminal and immigration law.

Mapping Wikipedia
A collaboration between TraceMedia and the Oxford Internet Institute. The map is generated from an archive of Wikipedia data and displays the geographical location of articles for a number of languages.
According to the Atlantic it shows that the majority of content comes from English speaking nations.