The Google Public Data Explorer is now ready to help you visualize your data.

The same tool that Google uses to let you explore datasets from select governments and NGOs has now been opened up to help you visualize your own data. The link above takes you the Google Code Labs homepage for the DSPL (Dataset Publishing Language) project.  On the page you’ll find tutorials on how to prepare your data for uploading.  Once it’s uploaded you’ll be able to explore your data through animated charts, time series , and even map visualizations.

Want to try it out but don’t want to do it alone.  Let me know and I’d be happy to help!

Starting soon I will begin a series of blog posts on easy ways to “keep up” with the academic disciplines that I support here at Drexel.  That’s the plan anyway.  Sometimes, though, something comes up that is just more pressing.

Here are some ways to keep up with the events around the earthquake in Haiti.  This is obviously a very selective list.

Newspapers and News Media:

• The New York Times: Times Topics – Haiti
• WorldNews.com (articles from many international newspapers)
• BBC News – Haiti Earthquake
• Le Monde (in French)
• CNN – Haiti Earthquake
• LexisNexis Academic Universe – Drexel subscribes to this massive database of fulltext newspapers and news sources from around the world.  Search tip: Try searching the terms “Haiti” and “earthquake” along with other terms like relief, aid, medicine, food supply, water, refugees, shelter. Limit results to “previous week” or “Date is after…”

Other Sources:

• USGS Earthquake Hazards Program – data, maps, reports about the quake
• Ciné Institute’s Vimeo page (post-quake student videos from Jacmel, Haiti)
• UT Austin’s Perry-Casteñeda Library’s Maps of Current Interest - great links to online maps of Haiti
• Google Crisis Response – gateway page for Google resources for information.  Especially important are the Google Earth maps with pre/post satellite images and the People Tracker gadget to help people locate friends and relatives in Haiti.  The Google Earth image below will look best with the Google Earth Plugin for your web browser (get it here).

Welcome back everyone!

This Fall I’m trying something new.  I am offering online office hours with Adobe Connect.

Twice a week (starting September 24th), on Mondays and Thursdays from 3pm to 4pm, I will be online in a virtual meetingspace ready to help you with your research needs.  Here is the link: http://drexelmeeting.na4.acrobat.com/r55763449/

screenshot of Adobe Connect meetingspace

With this tool, you will be able to watch me demonstrate a database, explain how to collect citations with RefWorks or Zotero, or chat about your research topic, all in realtime.  Adobe Connect is AV chat ready to facilitate a real discussion and several people can be in the meetingspace at once, so a whole group can join in the conversation.

This will be a trial to see if there is interest in this kind of service.  If there is, I may be able to expand the hours I am available.

And don’t worry, I’ll still be just as available as I always have been. You can reach me in person or electronically over IM, email, or phone.

If you haven’t yet tried Zotero, a free, open source citation management system (CMS) for the Firefox browser that is similar to RefWorks and Endnote, this would be a good time to give it a shot.

The Zotero 2.0 beta already syncs citations and notes remotely and, if you have a webDAV account, can even sync your PDFs.  This weekend’s update to 2.0b3 has now added (partial list):

• Support for group libraries
  • Create and join public and private groups on zotero.org
  • Access group materials from within Zotero, even when you are offline
  • Easily move materials from a group library into your personal library
• Add Item by Identifier
  • Automatically add an item by DOI, ISBN, or PubMed ID
• RTF Citation Scan
  • Author a document in your editor of choice using ”(Smith, 2006)” citation placeholders, save as RTF, and run through Zotero for automatic formatting in style of choice
  • Asks for disambiguation if required
  • Still under development
  • Does not currently work for names with accents
• Import from Clipboard
  • Import any supported format (RIS, BibTeX, etc.) from the clipboard
  • Available via Actions menu option and keyboard shortcut (Cmd-Shift-V/Ctrl-Alt-V)

This can be a very power research tool.  If you have any questions about using it I’d be happy to talk with you about it.

Communication and Mass Media Complete

The Library just subscribed to EBSCO’s Communication and Mass Media Complete, an extensive database with a large amount of scholarly fulltext journal content covering all aspects of Communications and related areas.

From the database description: CMMC incorporates the content of CommSearch (formerly produced by the National Communication Association) and Mass Media Articles Index (formerly produced by Penn State) along with numerous other journals in communication, mass media, and other closely-related fields of study to create a research and reference resource encompassing the breadth of the communication discipline. CMMC offers cover-to-cover (core) indexing and abstracts for more than 420 journals, and selected (priority) coverage of nearly 200 more, for a combined coverage of more than 600 titles.

This is a very important resource and greatly expands the Drexel community’s access to scholarly information in this field.

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.