Sage Research Methods Online has just started a free public beta test.  And the Library has started an institutional trial too.  The resource, which contains over 100,000 pages of books, journals, encyclopedias and handbooks, is designed to help you choose and implement the best social science research method for your project. You can use the Library’s trial or set up your own. Access is free (registration required) until the formal product launch in January 2011.  Please let me know if you have any feedback about this tool.

And if social science research is your thing, take a look at Methodspace, a social network for researchers that is also from Sage.  It’s free!

The Curfew

Readers of this blog have probably noticed that I am fond of visual ways of exploring complex issues.  Often that involves maps but sometimes, as with ICED, that means web-based games.  The Curfew is a game (currently in beta) from Channel4 and LittleLoud in the UK with the support of groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, among others.

Set in an authoritarian Britain in 2027, the game allows you to explore, in a compelling, fun way, issues such as privacy, citizenship, security, surveillance, civil liberties, and human rights.  The production values are very high with a mix of live action and computer graphics and, if you login to your Facebook or Twitter accounts, it integrates information about you into the game as an extra creepy bonus.  Give it a look and let me know what you think!

Elena Kagen – Law Library of Congress

Whether you are a policy wonk (I am), a Supreme Court groupie (got me again), or just interested in the way the nation’s highest court helps shape our society (yep), this new page from the LLoC will be very useful as we gear up for Elena Kagen’s Senate confirmation hearings.

This guide links to the books and articles she has written, the Congressional documents concerning her last judicial nomination, her oral arguments before the Supreme Court, and an extensive collection of web sites and videos about her.

Take a look and you’ll be ready to do your own fact-checking when the hearing starts!

Oil Spill Cris Map [from the Louisiana Bucket Brigade]

I’m always impressed at how quickly important events are mapped these days.  As you have probably noticed, I am very interested in the ways GIS tools are used to visualize data and help us understand our world using maps.  That will be the subject of an upcoming, and much longer, blog post.  For now, let me just mention this great new project of made by students at Tulane University in conjunction with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

It uses the Ushahidi mapping tool, an Open Source project that lets people visualize and map data that is collaboratively collected using SMS, email, and web sites.  It’s a cool tool in itself.  The way it is being used for the Oil Spill Crisis Map is exciting too.  People in Gulf Coast communities and around the world can use it to track the impact of this massive oil spill, all in real time.  This could be useful information for students interested in environmental policy, public policy and environmental science, among other fields.

More maps and forecasting is available from NOAA here.

Data Store: World Government Data

If you like your data international, free, and easy to find then the UK newpaper,  The Guardian, has a site for you!

World Government Data draws from publicly available government databases like data.gov for the US and the cleverly named data.gov.uk.  Now you can browse or cross-search government datasets from the UK, USA, Australia, New Zealand, with more sources added as they come available.

Even better, though it’s Open Platform API, the Guardian gives you tools to build visualizations and create apps that use the Data Store.  You can browse some of the apps that have been created so far here.

Ever hear a news story on the radio about a new bill introduced in Congress and wonder what the bill actually proposes? Well, I do.   Let me show you a quick way to find out just what that bill says.

The easiest way is to use Thomas (thomas.loc.gov), the legislative information gateway of the Library of Congress.

You can search for legislation from the current Congress (there’s a new one every two years) right from the middle of the home page.

Right below the search box are drop-down menus that you could use to see what legislation  a particular Senator or Representative has been involved with.  You can also search for terms across multiple Congresses.

OK, let’s track down the bill I heard about on the radio, it was about college textbooks.  I didn’t catch the sponsor’s name so let’s just search for the keyword “textbooks”.

This search brings us results from two bills.  One is H.R.1464 and the other is S.1714.  Now I heard them say this was a Senate bill, so we’ll  click on the link for S.1714.

From this link we see that this bill was introduced by Sen. Richard Durban (IL) on 9/24/2009 and is titled, “A bill to authorize grants for the creation, update, or adaption of open textbooks, and for other purposes. “   Hmm, sounds interesting, huh? We can also see what Senate committee the bill is before and there is a link to the full text of the bill.

You can also follow links to see what action has been taken on the bill, including Sen. Durban’s introductory remarks for the bill, from the Congressional Record.  When available, there will also be links to the Congressional Budget Offices’ (CBO) cost estimates for the bill.

Pretty cool stuff.  And that House bill looks interesting too.  We could go back and look at that too.

Looking for something older than this Congress?  No problem.  Thomas searches back to the 101st Congress (January 3, 1989 to January 3, 1991).  And Drexel has a subscription to Lexis Nexis Congressional (including Congressional publications called the Serial Set) that searches content all the way back to the first Congress in 1789.

Oh, and if the title of this post didn’t start you humming, maybe this will help:

The Wilson Center is, right at this moment, running a live webcast of its panel discussion of KGB officer turned journalist Alexander Vassiliev’s newly released notebooks.   Drawn from the KGB archives, these notebooks offer an unprecedented look into Soviet espionage activities in the US from 1930-1950.  Some topics discussed will be Alger Hiss, and I.F. Stone.

The webcast is available here. The agenda is available here (PDF).

English language translations of the notebooks (now held by the Library of Congress) and available as PDFs here.

Primary day in Philadelphia is Tuesday, May 19th.  Do you know who is running? What ballot issues are up for the vote?  If not, Philly good government organization the Committee of Seventy has a web pages devoted to introducing the candidates and ballot issues.  You can find it here.

As part of it’s very interesting “Remade in America: The Newest Immigrants and their Impact” series, the New York Times has put up a fascinating interactive map that displays the country of origin for the foreign-born population by county.

This is pretty cool in itself but the demographics fun is multiplied when you notice the slider that lets you look at the map using data from every census back to 1880.  Want to see how the population of your home county has changed over the last 128 years?  Just move the slider and watch the color coding shift.  Want to see where people from a particular county settled, and when?  Just choose one of the countries a drop-down menu and you can see what counties they settled in.  Sadly the list of countries isn’t very long but does cover the most common countries of origin.

A mouse-over of the county will cause the county, it’s number of foreign-born residents, and total population — all for the selected census–to be identified in a bubble.

New York Times–Immigration Explorer

The New York Times has an interesting web feature up right now that presents a timeline of all of the presidential Inaugural addresses from 1789 on.  While that is pretty useful in itself, this site is particularly interesting because it shows you a tag cloud of the frequently used words in each speech.  It’s a great way to quickly survey the changing language and themes.

The page is available here: Inaugural Words: 1789 to the Present.