Just Launched! ICED Video Game from Breakthrough: building human rights culture.

Not so much a research tool as an interesting use of technology to raise public awareness of a hot social issue, ICED: I Can End Deportation is a free video game that explores the immigration debate from the point of view of immigrant teens. The game, put out by human rights NGO Breakthrough, has sparked a bit of controversy in the news media lately.

The premise of the game involves moving immigrant teens through the maze of American daily life with the goal of obtaining citizenship. Along the way the teens must make the right choices and give the right answers in their interactions with Immigration authorities to avoid detention and deportation.

This isn’t the first time that a video game launch has fed debates over contentious social and political issues. What makes this game so interesting is that the game itself is being used as an issue-advocacy tool. Clearly the importance of video games as an informative and persuasive medium is growing.

OECD Statistics Portal

The OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) is beta testing OECD.Stat, it’s new statistical data browser.

What does that mean to you? Well, between now and mid-2008 access to OECD statistical data is free while they test out the new browser.

This is an opportunity to look at high quality social and economic datasets related to development and international aid, health, education, energy, and finance.

This page provides a table that lets you browse by topic. A good example of what you will find further inside is the database OECD Gender, Institutions and Development Statistics.

This is a terrific resource and I encourage you to try it out. As always, I’d like to hear what you used it for and what you think it.

Note: Parts of the database may be offline at times. This is a beta test, after all.

The Law Library has just added two new databases which can also be useful for History and Political Science.

The Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature provides full-text access to the contents of two important collections of business and economics books and periodicals published between 1450 and 1850. 61,000 books and 466 periodicals are digitally reproduced covering subjects as diverse as commerce, trade, finance, politics, colonization, slavery, law, and history.

The Economist Historical Archive provides the full-text of The Economist magazine from 1843 up through five years from the present. Covering world politics, business, technology, science and culture this archive is an important resource for contemporary views of issues from the 19th and 20th centuries. This database includes The Economist’s frequent special topic issues and supplements and the magazine’s articles, tables, photographs, ads, and maps are all fully searchable. An exciting new feature is the ability to export many of the tables and charts to external applications for use in your projects.

You can access these databases from the links above or via the Find Databases/Journal Articles link on the Drexel University Libraries homepage.

As always, I am happy to help anyone explore how to use these resources for your own projects.

With violence in Darfur back on the front page of yesterday’s New York Times, I was reminded of the Darfur mapping project that the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum puts out using Google Earth.

Called Crisis in Darfur, the project uses data from the U.S. State Dept. to locate damaged and destroyed villages and data from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees to locate refugees and Internally Displaced Persons on the map.

Additional resources include photos, personal testimonies, and KML files.

This project can be used to help visualize the conflict and can be used in custom presentations.

Another interesting human rights/mapping project is the AAAS Science and Human Rights Program’s Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights which uses high resolution sensor data from satellites, GIS tools and analysis, and web-based map tools to create human rights case studies. There are currently case studies for Burma, Chad and Sudan, Eritrea, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, North Korea, Zimbabwe.

So, welcome to my new Social Sciences blog! This will hopefully become an outlet for me to let you know about new resources for the Social Sciences available to Drexel University students. Some of these will be library resources like new databases or books and journals. Some of what I will be writing about will be interesting websites available to everyone over the internet. And sometimes I will write about new tools and techniques that could help you interact with Social Science information in a new way.

I welcome comments, tips and suggestions and am especially interested in hearing what tools and resources you find most helpful.