March 10, 2007
There is an interesting article by two of the creators of Many Eyes. IBM’s Many Eyes App After One Month by Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas Read/Write Web (March 05, 2007). While the initial examples they give of use of the site are, perhaps, not very social science data intensive, the implications for use of services like this (including Swivel and Data 360) may be profound. In the authors words, they wanted…
February 20, 2007
Preserving At-Risk Digital Social Science Data: The Data-PASS Project This is a webcast of a presentation given on January 26, 2007 by Myron Gutmann at the Library of Congress on the Data-PASS (Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences) project . (Running Time: 60 minutes) Myron P. Gutmann, professor of history and director of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan and the principal investigator of the Data-PASS partnership with the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (www.
January 26, 2007
IBM has announced Many Eyes, a site for sharing and commenting on visualizations. As with swivel, users can upload any data set, but the tools for visualizing and graphing the data are much richer. The visualization options include US and World maps, line graphs, stack graphs, bar charts, block histograms, bubble diagrams, scatter plots, network diagrams, pie charts, and treemaps. The site isn’t yet live, but should be very shortly.
January 21, 2007
At Gapminder there is a link to a video of Hans Rosling’s TED Talk Recorded February, 2006 in Monterey, CA. Rosling is professor of international health at Sweden’s world-renowned Karolinska Institute, and founder of Gapminder, a non-profit that brings vital global data to life. The video is definitely worth watching! It is interesting technically as a demonstration of data-visualization that is way beyond what we usually see. But it is also interesting because of the content of the data and how Rosling uses data visualization to “debunk a few myths about the ‘developing’ world.
December 23, 2006
Bill Hooker has written a nice article about ensuring that the data behind published scientific literature are made openly available. Where are the data? Can I have them? What can I do with them? (17 Dec, 2006). He takes a practical approach based on the perspective of a researcher. His title says it all. …an Open Data addendum must at least answer my opening questions: it must point to the online, freely accessible location of the raw, un-hamburgered data; it should make clear that yes, you can have them; and it should state clearly what you can do with them.
December 7, 2006
The UK Research Information Network “has published a report on the behaviour, perceptions and needs of researchers as users of discovery services.” Researchers and discovery services Behaviour, perceptions and needs (pdf) One interesting quote: The main uses of all the more general tools (such as Google, other forms of general web search and asking colleagues) are for more general background information activities. It is, however, worth noting that the general tools are also used to locate datasets whereas bibliographic tools are not.
November 2, 2006
The conference theme for IASSIST 2007, Building Global Knowledge Communities with Open Data, is very timely given new interest in defining and describing the open data concept. This week Peter Murray-Rust, who spearheads the SPARC-Opendata discussion list, posted a message announcing his entry for Open Data in the Wikipedia and inviting others to contribute to this entry. Robin Rice responded to Peter’s message with a copy of the IASSIST call for papers, which resulted in the following obervation from Peter: “Many of [the topics in the call for papers] have a close overlap with the topics at the Science Commons meeting and it is clear that Open Data is likely to become more widely used.
October 24, 2006
Google has announced a new service, that might make it possible for the data community to collaborate to build a customized data-finder. The service is the Google Custom Search Engine (CSE). Similar in some ways to Rollyo, a service that has been around for some time, the Google CSE has several nice features: Limit results of a Google search to specific sites. Exclude sites from search results. Collaborate on the selection of the sites to search and exclude Customize the search results page Add “refinements” that make it easy for users to refine search results Eliminate Google ads if hosted by a university, government agency, or non-profit There is a story about the service on eWeek: Google Copies Rollyo’s Business Plan, Inserts AdSense (October 24, 2006 4:01 AM) by Steve Bryant.
October 13, 2006
Shawn Nicholson pointed out on the IASSIST list: “As a follow on to the talk we heard in Ann Arbor, this set of PowerPoint presentations might be of interest: http://www.arl.org/info/events/ncr” NSF Workshop on New Collaborative Relationships: The Role of Academic Libraries in the Digital Data Universe
October 5, 2006
Luis Martinez, IASSIST member and Data Librarian at the London School of Economics, has begun an entry on Wikipedia on the topic “Data Library”. Luis welcomes this community’s help in fleshing it out and providing more context. For those who have never been involved with Wikipedia, the editors come round and add comments, and often seem to judge the importance of an entry based on the number of people involved with ‘curating’ it.
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