Ben Fry Visualizes the Evolution of Darwin’s Ideas

UC Berkeley Library's Congressional Research Tutorials [Macromedia Flash Player]

http://sunsite3.berkeley.edu/wikis/congresearch/

Making a clear and direct path through the vast amount of Congressional materials can be quite a chore, even for the most seasoned and experienced researcher. Fortunately, the University of California at Berkeley Library has created these fine Congressional tutorials. Designed to help users locate materials both online and in the library, these tutorials are in the form of short Flash-enabled videos. Most of the tutorials last about two minutes, and they include "Find a Bill", "How Do I Contact My Representative?", "Find Congressional Debate", and "Find a Hearing". After viewing one (or more) of these tutorials, users can also make their way to the "What's going on in Congress right now?" area to stay on top of the various activities of this important legislative body. [KMG]

Marylaine Block's always informative "Neat New Stuff" [Neat New Stuff I Found This Week at http://marylaine.com/neatnew.html] tipped us to the DataWeb site and its interesting tool, the Data Feret (or "dataferet").

"TheDataWeb is a network of online data libraries that the DataFerrett application accesses the data through. Data topics include, census data, economic data, health data, income and unemployment data, population data, labor data, cancer data, crime and transportation data, family dynamics, vital statistics data, . . . As a user, you have an easy access to all these kinds of data. As a participant in TheDataWeb, you can publish your data to TheDataWeb and, in turn, benefit as a provider to the consumer of data."

What is the DataFerrett?
DataFerrett is a unique data mining and extraction tool. DataFerrett allows you to select a databasket full of variables and then recode those variables as you need. You can then develop and customize tables. Selecting your results in your table you can create a chart or graph for a visual presentation into an html page. Save your data in the databasket and save your table for continued reuse. DataFerrett helps you locate and retrieve the data you need across the Internet to your desktop or system, regardless of where the data resides. DataFerrett: * lets you receive data in the form in which you need it (whether it be extracted to an ascii, SAS, SPSS, Excel/Access file); or * lets you move seamlessly between query, analysis, and visualization of data in one package; * lets data providers share their data easier, and manage their own online data. DataFerrett Desktop IconDataFerrett runs from the application icon installed on your desktop.

Check it out at http://www.thedataweb.org/

Yes, call us fickle and lacking in loyalty when it comes to note-taking and research organization tools.  Does anyone else remember the 5x8 cards with holes punched on all four perimeters?  You entered "tags" or keywords by clipping out the outer edge of the hole, and when you needed to find a particular note card, a knitting needle-sized wire was inserted into the whole pack.  Shake the cards and the desired note fell out.  Sometimes.

Since going digital 25 years ago, we've tried dozens of tools to try and bring some order to what we've turned up online and need to save.  Most were fine innovations and advances at the time, but there was often something that didn't quite meet all of our needs or desires.  That still might be true, but a new entry in the research management derby (thanks to the cite from The Scout Report quoted below) delivers up an impressive new tool.

Zotero

http://www.zotero.org/

"It can be hard to keep Tom Wolfe and Thomas Wolfe straight at times, and if you are working on an academic paper that incorporates both of these august characters, you probably want to keep those research sources in good order. Thanks to Zotero, it is very easy to do just that. Zotero is a Firefox extension that helps users collect, manage, and cite their research sources. Zotero can automatically capture citation information from web pages, store PDF files, and also export these citations with relatively ease. This very helpful extension is compatible with computers running Firefox 2.0." [KMG]

From O'Reilly Radar's Publishing blog comes this interesting item. See http://radar.oreilly.com/publishing/

The Traditional Future

"A prominent U.S. sociologist and student of professions, Andrew Abbott of the University of Chicago, has written a thought-provoking thesis on what he terms "library research" -- that is, research as performed with library-held resources by historians, et. al, via the reading and browsing of texts -- compared to social science research, which has a more linear, "Idea->Question->Data->Method->Result" type of methodology.

"The pre-print, "The Traditional Future: A Computational Theory of Library Research," is full of insights about library centric research, including intriguing parallels between library research and neural net computing architectures; a comparison that made me think anew, and with more clarity, about how the science of history is conducted. Armed with a distinctive interpretation of library research, Abbott is able to draw some incisive conclusions about the ramifications of large repositories of digitized texts (such as Google Book Search) on the conduct of scholarship..."