Mapping Flows through Geographic Space

A couple of applications are now available for visualizing flows through geographic space. This is especially useful for research that combines GIS and Network Analysis.

CSISS - Spatial Tools: Tobler's Flow Mapper is a stand-alone program that is relatively easy to learn and use.

An ARC GIS add on program authored by Alan Glennon (of UCSB), while not as user-friendly or accessible as the Tobler program, allows for making more sophisticated maps.

MITH mobile

Again, it's not exactly political science, but the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities often touches on issues and applications that seem potentially relevant to the scholarly study of political life.

For instance, from 12:30-1:45 tomorrow (Tues, Sept 26th), Kevin Bertram will present "You Can Take It With You: The Nascent Role for Mobile in the Digital Humanities" in UM 's McKeldin Library B0135

From the announcement:

"More than 4 out of 5 American adults own at least one wireless device, and there are now more mobile phones in the US than televisions and computers, combined. Despite the ubiquity of the cell phone, we are still only in the infancy of adoption of mobile's more advanced capabilities, and full-fledged explorations of its use within the humanities. This session will feature discussion of the current mobile landscape and possible visions for the mobile-enabled future, with a focus on innovative uses of mobile technology in the arts, and the technology's influence on language, literature and culture."

Kevin Bertram is founder and CEO of Distributive Networks, a DC company that develops mobile content and technology services.

Other MITH Digital Dialogues this fall - all are FREE and open to the public.

Zotero - The Next-Generation Research Tool

The Center for History and New Media, at George Mason University, is about to publically release the beta version of its (open source) "Zotero" tool. Check it out. It looks like an innovative blend of bibliographic (e.g. Endnote), notetaking (e.g. MS OneNote), desktop searching (e.g. Copernic or Google Desktop), and web-research organization (e.g. Google Notebook) software.

Teaching qualitative methods

FYI: Jane Hood (UNM) has recently published "Teaching against the text: the case of qualitative methods," in Teaching Sociology 34, July p 207-23.

From the abstract:

"Myths about the nature and practice of qualitative research are both embedded in the mainstream folklore and supported by the textbooks that we use in our classrooms. However, many students resist instructors' attempts to question textbooks, which they regard as "gospel truth". How can we get our students to go beyond both textbook myths and mainstream folklore to grapple with misleading and inaccurate statements? In this article I suggest several strategies to raise awareness of myths about qualitative research, explain why several common statements about qualitative methods are myths, and suggest classroom strategies for engaging students in challenging these myths."

Indeed.

Will teach/research for tenure

I'm convinced that Political Science (and social sciences, generally) must develop our technological literacy and proficiency if we want to understand the full range of political behavior today - and tomorrow.

I am also on the job market this year. While I'm scouring every source I can think of to find environment-related (my principle substantive interest) job announcements, it turns out that tech-methodology jobs are not easily identified.

With that in mind, I'm running up a flag here, in case anyone who visits knows of any positions I may have missed. Please feel free to contact me directly (follow the link under my profile, at right), or through the comments below.

In addition to what I've helped to produce here, feel free to look over my Curriculum Vitae and pass either along to anyone you think might be interested in hiring someone to help develop these sorts of skills, capacities, and interests in their department.

MS Office save as PDF

Okay, so it still doesn't convert from pdf to Word, but this is still a useful too. In June, MS quietly released an add-in that allows users of Office '07 to save any file in that suite to pdf form.

Handy.

PDF Converter

Docsmartz PDF Converter: Convert PDF to Word Conversion Software

Prof. Ric Uslaner (a political scientist here at Maryland) is raving about this program. According to the company's website: "Docsmartz PDF converter is a very easy-to-use tool to convert PDF files to Word or the .rtf format. This conversion software tool comes with multiple capabilities and you can extract images; convert PDF files in many languages; convert very large files, convert select pages; and choose the output format."

According to Ric, he has found it to be an effecitve tool for converting files with several images and graphs from Wordperfect to Word. Apparently, such Wordperfect documents normally do not convert well to Word; but, by first converting his Wordperfect document to PDF, he was able to make a flawless conversion from PDF to .doc using Docsmartz.

However, the software costs $20. Anyone know of freeware available that performs this function with comparable efficacy?

Open-source CAQDAS

A recent exchange on the QUALRS listserv reminded me of XXXX open-source software packages for those interested in computer-supported qualitative analyses:

QBIQ (Windows, Linux)
TAMS (Mac OS X)
WeftQDA (Windows, Linux)

I've not really played with these myself, but am seriously considering using at least WeftQDA the next time I teach research methods.

Is the truth out there?

Earlier this month, Ken Johnson wrote an interesting piece for the Boston Globe, looking at Marc Lombardi's beautiful work on conspiracy networks.

Of course, you really should see Lombardi's work in the flesh.

What is data mining?

According to Jeff Jonas, it is "torturing the data until it confesses … and if you torture it enough, you can get it to confess to anything."

Of course, he also offers several semi-official definitions, from sources such as the GAO, CRS, Wiki, etal.

Worth a look.

Person-to-person-to-person

GW's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet will be hosting a half-day workshop on Person-to-Person-to-Person: Harnessing the Political Power of Social Networks and User-Generated Content this Friday, September 15th, from 9am - 12pm.

It's FREE and open to the public, but an RSVP is required.

Exposure, invasion, drama

Online community researcher Danah Boyd has written a fascinating essay on Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck". Even if you're not the Facebook type (I'm not either), I think her essay is worth ten minutes of your time.

Danah describes an understanding of privacy that is deeply subjective - more about "exposure, invasion, and drama" than about any objective, semi-permanent attribute. While I'm not sure her ideas work for all aspects of privacy (e.g., state surveillance), I'm not sure she's wrong, either.

A fascinating read, at the very least.

Panopticon

It seems there may be some benefits to a surveillance society. Global Voices Online (a Harvard-based project to highlight "citizen media" in every region of the world) has linked to a post by Malaysian blogger Sameer Padania, about the use of cell phone cameras to document police corruption.

Given the ubiquity of both cell phones and corruption in so many developing societies, this seems to be a positive and possibly sustainable means of using the first to curtail the latter. Of course, we all remember the Rodney King beating; to work, the approach requires at least some level of official support (kudos to Malaysian police officials).

Still, this presents a tool for citizen oversight that I'm not sure many would have anticipated - at least in the developing world (conventional video is still fairly expensive). Fascinating.

P.S. Neither cell phones nor corruption are limited to the developing world, of course. While this approach might also help us to curtail abuses of power here, we also need to ensure that we are actually empowered to conduct such oversight.

Google history

This is probably the coolest thing I've seen today. Google has been hard at work with the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, the Guardian, and others to produce the Google News Archive.

Punch in a search term, and you get archived news stories from participating media outlets. You can then narrow in on a specific historical period, or view results as a timeline.

Way.

Internet literacy

Even though it sometimes seems that undergraduates have a facility with technology that borders on zen (think text messaging), it turns out that for most, their Internet research skills are quite weak.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram is reporting on an ETS survey of 10,000 high school and college students that showed that almost half have very limited knowledge of how to use the Internet to perform high-quality research.

ETS' conclusion: schools need to pay them $27-33 per student to assess their research skills, and more importantly, begin teaching web-based and electronic research skills early, in middle and high schools.

Personally, I think we could probably take it as given that students could benefit from direction (I know I could), and skip the transfers to ETS. However, much thanks to them for pointing out the problem.

Hiatus

Anyone who's been checking the blog over the summer (or simply looks at the posting dates) has noticed that we've been a bit lax over the past month or so.

I now have a big backlog of posting candidates sitting in my email, and will do my best to post them over the next couple of weeks.

My summer was spent teaching, including a course on The Craft of Political Science Research, which included theory, discussion, and hands-on practice with a range of research methods, including several tech-supported approaches (e.g., online surveys, digital recording and transcription, content analysis).

Because it was a 6-week intensive, the entire class researched a single topic - privacy and surveillance - and I did not require a final paper. Rather, I encouraged each student to dig deeply into whatever aspect of the larger issues interested them, and apply the tools and concepts from class and the readings to learn more.

The course worked quite well (inasmuch as students seemed to enjoy and learn from the experience). I would very much appreciated comments and suggestions of the course, should anyone out there feel the urge.

More CAQDAS news

The CAQDAS market must be getting tighter. ATLAS.ti (another old-school CAQDAS package) recently announced not only update v5.2 (see below), but that they are now offering deeper academic discounts for students (now only $175 - a good deal).

The new version supports a wider variety of multimedia files (including video), and a flurry of program tweaks.

For those who haven't futzed with ATLAS.ti, think of it as a code-and-retrieve workhorse that's strongest with qualitative (e.g., grounded theory) assessment of text, visual, and audio data. Fun stuff, indeed.

Oh yeah - there's also a FREE trial version. No time limit, full functionality, minus some limitations on the number of documents and codings that can be applied. Think creatively, and this might be a good option for those teaching research methods.

MAXqda

It seems the developers of the CAQDAS software suite MAXqda have made a few innovations. Now, in addition to a sophisticated code-and-retrieve memo system, users are able to integrate those codes into MAX Maps, which is something of a cross between traditional mindmapping and Boolean graphical concept mapping.

It's not cheap ($445 for a singel academic license) but MAXqda is one of the most established names in CAQDAS software - meaning that not only is it generally more sophisticated than some latecomers, but that it likely has fewer bugs.

There's a 30-day free trial, should you want to check it out (or perhaps include it in a research methods course?).