Social Science sites of the week
Here is our latest round up of key and interesting sites for social scienctists.
This week view our selection of news and social media sites covering the Diamond Jubilee
To mark the Occasion the National Archives have released free online an exhibition of 60 images of congratulatory addresses sent to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her diamond jubilee. They stunning include illuminated manuscripts, bound books with decoration and scrolls sent by heads of state and Uk institutions.
Released free for the Jubilee: Queen Victoria’s Journals
Free access to the full text of volumes of diaries written by Queen Victoria f rom 1832-1901. They include images and transcriptions. The period covers her youth, accession to throne and marriage. Coverage of daily life, household, meetings with famous persons and state occasions. Also commentary on empire and the role of women in Victorian England. The resources page has timelines of key events, quotations, glossaries and background essays. There are also links to other Queen Victoria related sites. At present searching by keyword is rather restricted as transcriptions have only been added for some sections of the data.
Here is a typical entry which gives the flavour!
Journal Entry:Sunday 2nd September 1838 Place of Writing: (Principal Royal Residence) Windsor Castle
Lord Esher’s typescripts
Volume Page number(s):97-105
“Then we spoke of India for a long time, where Major Keppell has been for some time, and he spoke of the impossibility of making the Sea Poys leave their Country, unless they have the Ganges water to drink,&c.,&c.; and of the horrid practice of throwing all the dead bodies into the Ganges instead of burying them, where the Turky Buzards &c. devour them; and Lord M. said Mr. Macaulay gave a dreadful account of that; and of your being obliged to send your servant with a pike,
to send these bodies down the River, “for you find your garden clogged with dead bodies”; which is too horrid! Mr. Macaulay didn’t like India, Lord M. said. Stayed up till ½ p.11. It was a charming evening”
Mapco: London Maps.
Free access to a collection of other 70 historic maps of London. Includes: tube stations street art. See
Stanford’s Library Map Of London And Its Suburbs 1864; Showing All The Proposed Metropolitan Railways and Improvements.
Stanford’s Library Map Of London And Its Suburbs. Date: 1872
Other useful London maps. Include the famous Booth poverty maps
Compare London in the 1880s and nowadays. These maps chart areas of poverty. See where the criminal classes lived. The Booth collection at LSE Archives also contains the original records from Booth’s survey into life and labour in London, dating from 1886 to 1903.the notebooks from the researchers and background into their methodology can be seen on the website.
Derelict London
Fascinating website containing photographs taken by Paul Talling. It has over 3,000 contemporary images. Shows a different side of the capital section include street art, tube, cemeteries also some e then and now photos. All images copyrighted.
2011 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices
Just released by the U.S. Department of State. Items online from 1999 onwards. Gives a snapshot of world trends and profiles practices and abuses in specific nations. There are also separate human right series covering religious freedoms and trafficking in persons.
Other organizations producing well regarded series include Amnesty international which has an online library of reports.
Human Rights Watch
Freedom House – which produced freedom of the press reports, freedom in the world reports and other special reports including women’s rights.
Kinonedelja – Online Edition
Austrian Film Museum has just published online a collection of historic newsreels produced by Dziga Vertov . The 35 news reels were produced between May 1918 and June 1919 and cover events in Soviet Russia. They include coverage of civil war and early Soviet republic. Speeches by Lenin The entry for each news reel has annotations in English on the content. Technical and copyright information is displayed on the website.
People & Planet Green League 2012 Tables
See the latest ranking of Uk universities acording to their environmental policies. Topics covered include: policy, carbon emissions, waste, recycling ethical procurement and fairtrade. Website provides information on methodology.
There are also previous league tables from 2007 onwards.
Zapaday
Has launched a news service that publishes breaking future news headlines. The service, available at uses real time analysis of online news and Twitter texts to spot upcoming headlines as they emerge. The site also has a large free news calendar and events service. Events include national holidays, sporting. See more on the methodology
Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries
Innocenti Report Card 10
Just released by UNICEF shocking statistics about extent of childhood poverty in the world’s richest nations. It uses data from the European Union’s Statistics on Incomes and Living Conditions survey of 125,000 households in 31 European countries
Other useful websites for obtaining facts, figures and reports about poverty and British children include the Child Poverty Action Group.
The End Child Poverty campaign has poverty maps for the uk.
the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has online reports about the impact of poverty on daily life.
Digital National Library of Serbia
is engaging in a major programme of digitisation of key resources.
The poster library. has 375 beautiful images of historic stock share issues.
There is also a separate historic newspaper section
OA Hermes
Good for locating research papers and grey literature from and about Latin America,.
It has been established by the Autnoma National University of Mexico under the patronage of CUDI (Corporacion University for the development of the Internet).and currently cross sources 60 key websites and indexes.that are important for all aspects of latin American studies. These include: scielo, theses from Latin american universities, and other research centres.
