If you've ever been to the LOC (or done fieldwork in places where photocopies are costly or otherwise limited), you may have thought about dragging along a scanner to make digital copies (I even have a nice case for mine).

Welcome to the new world. Snapter converts snaps to text, with a nifty perspective adjustment that even supports open-faced books. Priced at $20 or $49, it's a cost-effective alternative to schlepping a scanner around.

I imagine a very clever person could find a way to automatically send hi-res cellphone snaps to an archival location, for backup.

Reporting on an interesting GOTV innovation from the Obama camp:

"The Obama campaign's New Media experts created a computer program that would allow a "flusher"—the term for a volunteer who rounds up nonvoters on Election Day—to know exactly who had, and had not, voted in real time. They dubbed it Project Houdini, because of the way names disappear off the list instantly once people are identified as they wait in line at their local polling station."

Fascinating.

The latest issue of Newsweek is reporting that both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns came under a "sophisticated cyberattack by an unknown foreign entity" over the summer.

Both campaigns reported what they initially thought were phishing attacks to the FBI, whose initial investigation determined that:

"You have a problem way bigger than what you understand ... You have been compromised, and a serious amount of files have been loaded off your system."

Newsweek is also reporting that the FBI believes the information could be used to provide background on the candidate's policy positions, and thus leverage for future negotiations.

Anyone looking for digital material should check-out this list of 100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access, complements of collegedegree.com. I have to admit, I had no idea that this much digital material is freely available. What we now need is a searchable meta-catalog.

Every year, Microsoft holds a Research Faculty Summit, to highlight the work being done in MS Research. This year, Marc Smith presented an add-in for MS Excel (2007*) that allows users to generate and manipulate social networks within more familiar environs.

I've always wondered why Excel lacked the capacity to display networks - seems like a no-brainer for Microsoft. Granted, SNA is far more complicated than it might appear at first blush, but with the growing availability of such data, I suspect more and more social scientists will learn how to use these tools.

Adding SNA capability to the most common desktop software in the world should speed things up a bit.

*Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to work with earlier versions of MS Excel (another "feature" of Office 2007).

OK, so this is not social science, but one can easily imagine social science (and digital humanities) counterparts to this creative pedagogical device put together by a team of chemists and IT-specialists at the University of Nottingham. Their Periodic Table of Videos is a twist on the periodic table of chemical elements. It allows the user to click on any element in the table to view a short video describing the major properties of, and other notable facts about, the element. While not exactly a novel concept, what makes the table attractive is the high quality of the videos, which were produced by a "video journalist [Brady Haran] .. passionate about science communication." I think this serves as yet another example of the research and pedagogical value of forging collaborative partnerships between substantive experts and those well versed in the art and science of information technology.

While I'm thinking of it, one interesting pedagogical application for one of my areas of substantive interest would be a "Video-Annotated American Constitution," where the user can click on specific provisions of the Constitution to see videos and/or podcasts pertaining to it. This would be a multimedia enhancement to (more and more common) text-annotated versions, such as those created by Cornell University Law School, FindLaw, and Justia. Even better would be a fully Web 2.0 equipped version that allows users to upload content and offer their own comments and annotations.

When Ken and I started this blog, we really were just looking for a convenient way to post pertinent websites for own personal collaborative purposes. This was only a few years ago, but at the time there was no tool (that we knew of) comparable to, say, Google Notebook. We also did not have easy access to a wiki. So, we settled upon a blog. To our surprise, we started attracting visitors, and we have tried to adapt our style and approach to accommodate your interests. Hopefully this has been successful, our periodic lulls in activity not withstanding.

Anyway, if we were starting today, we very well might have began with a format close to what Lisa Spiro has designed with her new "digitalresearchtools" wiki. This site has the potential to evolve into a very useful resource for those of us interested in applying information technologies to enhance research potential, and so I am pleased to put in a plug for it. According to the site's description:

"This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you're looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool's features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers."

Kathy Schrock has created a Diigo list of "links to support the use of Web 2.0 tools for teaching and learning in the K-12 environment." However, many of the tools on her list are also applicable to this blog's focus upon tools for social science research. The list, which now includes over 60 entries, is organized according to the following categories: Aggregators, Collaboration Tools, Online Applications, Photo Sharing, Podcasting, Presentation Tools, Social Networking, Utilities, Video Sharing, and Web 2.0 Portals.

The Christian Science Monitor has just published a "Patchwork Nation" page designed for viewing the 2008 presidential election from the perspective of 11 geographically clustered "voter communities" defined according to a variety of religious, socio-economic, and cultural variables. Based upon the GIS analysis of James Gimpel (Professor of Government and Politics here at the University of Maryland), the page features a map with 3,142 counties color-coded as being statistically most like one of the 11 community types.
The map is also interactive, allowing the user to control which communities are displayed and whether or not counties lines are hidden or displayed. They are also tracking candidate visits to see what kind of voter communities the candidates are targeting. They are vague as to what else they have planned, but their stated intention is "to watch 11 different presidential elections unfold at the same time in real time, to see which issues matter to different kinds of communities and how the candidates change their messages depending on their audience." Sounds like text mining and/or automated content analysis may be in the works as well.

Billing itself as the place for "large data sets and the people who love them: the scrapers and crawlers who collect them, the academics and geeks who process them, the designers and artists who visualize them," (theinfo) is an excellent resource for those curious - and experienced - about meaningfully engaging the vast volumes of content that comes with an online world.

Whether your focus is on content/data acquisition, analysis, or representation, there are mailing lists, data sets (or visualizations), and experienced advice available. (theinfo) is crowd-sourced - while the community appears small now, the potential exists for this to become a fantastic resource.

Ad hoc, first-person reporting from disasters and emergencies is now an established practice (e.g., the 2004 tsunami, or hurricane Katrina). With mash-ups, it has become common to situate such accounts within their geographical context (e.g., Google Earth kml layers for the London attacks).

Those interested in such phenomena should check out Ushahidi, which tracks Kenya's post-election violence. Local residents may submit incident reports via SMS, which viewers can later filter by location or type.

For those interested in fully and semi-automated approaches to analyzing unstructured text, the Text Analytics Wiki offers a way to familiarize yourselves with the range of techniques available, and to stay on top of the latest developments in the field.

A ton of content is already available - the TA Wiki links to relevant news aggregators, listservs, blogs, universities and private researchers, issue papers, software, conferences, and more.

Truly, a rich resource. Especially as documented political discourse so dramatically expanding with the growth of e-governance, campaign websites, blogs, and other online media.

Education Portal has compiled a list of ten top Universities with the Best Free Online Courses. If the basic insight behind Will Hunt's quip in Goodwill Hunting (to the effect that someone with brains and drive could receive a better education paying nothing but library late fees than the typical privileged student who pays tens of thousands of dollars in tuition to attend a top university) had any truth at the time, it is no doubt even more true today. For one thing, you now don't even have to worry about late fees!

Read/WriteWeb founder Richard MacManus has offered a list of 10 Semantic Apps to Watch and an interesting discussion about what "Semantic Apps" are.

These, apps, he explains, (1) use the web as a platform, (2) are distinct from "semantic web" technologies in that they may or may not rely upon metadata standards (such as RDF or OWL), and (3) "all try try to determine the meaning of text and other data, and then create connections for users."

Mashable has created a convenient list of 30+ Mind Mapping Tools, both free and pay-for-use.

A very pleasant surprise - mere weeks after releasing QDA Miner 3.0, the team at Provalis Research have issued another features update.

Users now have the ability to import Atlas-ti 5.x "hermeneutic units" and to export co-occurrence matrices for network analysis.

Proprietary data formats have been a real limitation in CAQDAS software, keeping most users "locked-in" to whichever platform they use at the beginning of their work. I seriously doubt computer-supported data analysis will really "take-off" as long as such barriers exist.

Transfer to network analysis packages is less significant, only because QDA Miner has always had this feature (export matrix as Excel file, which most SNA packages read quite well). There are many examples of combined content and network analyses, but this seems to be a very underdeveloped technique in social science.

It's great to see developers of such great software continue to stretch and dissolve boundaries. Kudos to Normand for breaking down some walls.

Alex Wright (author of Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages) gave a fascinating presentation at Google last week, on The Web That Wasn't.

Laying out the web's pre-history (e.g., Otlet, Bush, Engelbart), Wright describes the contributions made by each of these men (and others), while covering some of the more creative ways that information architecture has been tweaked to promote a new scope and scale of human learning.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, I guarantee you'll learn something new.

Now that I'm back in the neighborhood, I'm curious to see whether there are any users or developers interested in computer-assisted social scholarship. I've a few projects already going (for which it might be nice to have collaborators), and a few ideas simmering.

Please feel free to forward this along - I'd really enjoy hearing from folks in the region (or even this time zone). Easiest way to contact me is through the comments (we moderate them to limit spam, but this also gives us the opportunity to communicate directly with posters).

Lifehacker has compiled a list of 50+ Social Bookmarking Sites.
Not much to add. Just that I found it informative.

Gina Trapani over at Lifehacker has offered a nice overview of techniques and tools for taking great notes in meetings, lectures, etc. The comments are also quite helpful, pointing to several software applications to assist with note taking and informative websites on the topic. For my money, using MS Word's Styles feature for creating flexible outlines remains my favorite tool for organizing my reading notes and for brainstorming ideas.

We posted about the beta version back in May, but now the full version of QDAMiner 3.0 is finally available.

Part of the Provalis suite of quantitative and qualitative text analysis tools, QDAMiner now also supports image coding (comparable to Atlas.ti), supervised machine learning (document classification based on example), and offers many improvements to common (and not so common) analytical and data management tasks.

Again, both Mike and I have used Provalis software for years, and we're still discovering ways we can use it to interrogate text. Once the academy realizes how much of what we study is leaving an electronic record, tools like Provalis will become de rigueur for serious social scientists.

I have been struck by the extent to which the "democracy" metaphor is used to describe Web 2.0 developments. As someone who has dabbled in the academic study of political theory in general, and democratic theory in particular, I have thought a lot lately about how important epistemological and information-cost assumptions are to the rationale for our political system, and how information technology may or may not therefore allow us to rethink the possibilities and limits of our democratic institutions. More specifically, I have thought that perhaps the apparent success of Web 2.0 at harnessing the "wisdom of the crowds" points to the real possibilities for a responsible and more equitable alternative to our representative-based legislatures and petition-vote based citizen initiatives.

I was therefore intrigued by Jason Calcanis' recent discussion of the advent of "Web 3.0," which is to him a marked improvement over Web 2.0 because it prevents "the 'wisdom of the crowds' from turning into the 'madness of the mobs' we've seen all to often, by balancing it with a respect of experts." It seems to me that democratic theory is more relevant today than it has been in decades (which isn't saying much). Recommended reading for all Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 enthusiasts is Robert Dahl's Democracy and Its Critics, especially his "critique of guardianship" (Ch. 5) and his discussion in the penultimate chapter (Ch. 22) on what he views as the single greatest threat to "democracy in tomorrow's world": the rise of a technocratic elite "expert class" that uses its power-knowledge to restrain and subjugate non-experts rather than to empower and emancipate them.

Tim O'Reilly offers interesting thoughts on the nature of the "semantic web" and how it differs from "web 2.0" in a recent post on his O'Reilly Radar. He think both terms are often misused, including in a recent Economist article on three web companies (ValuesOfN, Wesabe, and Tripit). While the distinction is probably obvious to a lot of people, I personally have found his discussion helpful, and I imagine most social scientists could as well.

For those of us who hope to engage students on issues such as political or economic development, the World Freedom Atlas is a fantastic resource.

Designer Zachary Johnson has created a very slick Flash interface for dozens of datasets (>300 variables) generated by academics, NGOs and IOs on the global distribution of human rights, governance, and development indicators between 1990 and 2006.

WFA not only maps national distributions of each, but also histograms and scatterplots, with the ability to show absolute values vs. change over time.

Can't wait to use it in my intro course.

H/T to information aesthetics for the link.

Semantic Web: Difficulties with the Classic Approach

Alex Iskhold has stimulated an interesting discussion at Read/WriteWeb on the somewhat disappointing progress over the past decade toward realizing the semantic web vision. At the heart of the problem, he argues, is the "bottom-up" approach to converting information from the web into RDF and OWL format. Although not offered in this post, he promises a future article outlining an alternative "top-down" model. I, for one, am on the edge of my seat.

A good overview of essential online references is available from Scholastici.us.

Yesterday, Matthew Hurst (Microsoft Live Labs and Data Mining) posted about five projects applying spidering, crawling, and text mining techniques to Track Political Buzz in the United States.

None are anywhere near as ambitious as VOSON (ANU, Canberra), their level of automated processing appears to vary widely, and they could all benefit from seriously (re)considering their information design. But they are all fairly serious attempts to distill relevant statistical and semantic information from the steadily expanding ocean of online political discourse.

These may seem like novelties now, but how long before it's critical that we apply (semi)automated tools to have any hope of seriously engaging the volume and variety of public discourse*?

* A 1999 paper used hand-coding to summarize 4,832 comments submitted for the Hoover National Forest (IN). According to a 2007 report on management plans for the Bitterroot, Lolo and Flathead National Forests (MT), hand-coding is still used. While the number of respondents was still relatively low (~2,800), other issues (e.g., the proposed elimination of the 2001 Roadless Area Rule) have garnered millions of comments.

Earlier this month, Smashing Magazine posted Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, a fascinating overview of 30+ online graphical experiments.

Most have been around awhile (at least in Internet terms), but we might all benefit from browsing these sites, and thinking about how patterns in our data might be better represented.

I haven't read through this yet, but Ithaka has published what promises to be an engaging report on the future of scholarly publication, called "University Publishing in a Digital Age."

Ismael Chang Ghalimi at IT Redux is maintaining an "Office 2.0 Database," which is an extensive list of web based applications designed to enhance personal productivity with the advantages (e.g. cost, convenience, and collaborative capabilities) of Web 2.0 functionality. I have to confess, I've only heard of at most 15% of these applications. It is incredibly exciting to think what will be developed over the next few years. If he keeps it up, Ismael's database should be a good place to stay current on "Office 2.0" developments.

Founded in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation funds efforts to provide greater transparency to democratic systems. Projects include MAPlight, The Center for Independent Media, OMB Watch, The Center for Democracy and Technology, The Center for Media and Democracy, CREW, and more:
Each applies info tech to create powerful tools to research political phenomena - achieving gains in speed and scale that I rarely see within the academy.

My friends know how geeky I can get about graphing data (and information design, generally). I'm no slouch at MS Excel, but today I got schooled. Chris Gemignani at juice analytics has a fascinating screencast in which he replicates this NYT graphic:


*Apologies for the lull in postings this summer. Mike and his wife are new parents, and I'm moving to WWU in Bellingham next month. Busy, busy, busy.

In April, SUNY-Albany librarian Laura Cohen described what she saw as "Social Scholarship on the Rise," a trend for scholars to discuss and engage their work via blogs, social networking services, and "soft peer review" (among other things).

Earlier this week, we saw an astonishing example of this process in practice.

On Monday night danah boyd, Berkeley grad student, Annenberg Fellow, and cogent observer of the (relatively) new world of "networked publics," used her blog to publish preliminary observations from her fieldwork on youth engagement with sites like MySpace and Facebook, and asked for feedback.

She posted again yesterday, this time about her shock at the response - within 24 hours, her essay had been viewed 90,000 times, reported on (poorly) by the BBC, and directly commented on over 170 times (190 as of this morning).

Think about this - a grad student publishes preliminary fieldwork notes to the web, and within 24-48 hours has drawn the attention of a mid-sized city. Granted, danah is a rock star, and not all of the comments were appropriate or well-conceived. But I think most academics would consider their careers a success if they commanded an audience of such size over their entire careers.

Is danah a super-hub? Are the rest of us scattered throughout the long tail? Clearly, on both counts. But at the very least, this suggests an emerging mode for scholarship, a new means of engaging the broader community (both scholarly and pedestrian) in our work.