socialscience@web2.0

As I’ve posted about before, there are a number of online office applications that give almost all the functionality you could need. However, Zoho and Google Docs both require you to register to edit the document. For one-off or irregular use, this is a hassle. So I’m currently in a quest for collaboration without registration. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, caught in a seemingly endless spiral of finding more and more references, reading about more and more sports matches and generally being increasingly unproductive, I spent some time on ebay (obviously) considering buying a typewriter. An old one. With no electronics.

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Somewhat unbelievably, but extremely usefully for students interested in developing web resources (or lecturers interested in persuading students to do so for them…), Microsoft has started giving away some of its fancier software to ‘validated’ students in the UK, US and Europe. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the biggest expenses after buying a computer is equipping it with Microsoft Office and having access to Word and Powerpoint, the current standards for writing and presenting. However, there are other ways. Most famous of these is perhaps Openoffice, an alternative office software which contains much the same tools, looks similar to Word (not 2007, the old one), can save in compatible file formats and is absolutely free. Read the rest of this entry »

The application I use the most, and which is some distance ahead of software like Endnote in terms of ease of use, is Citeulike, an online bibliography manager. Not only does it add articles with one click, but you can also browse other people’s libraries, in the way that you’d often find a great book next to the one you were looking for. You can set up watch lists for journals and group or individual libraries. It used to have a ‘touchgraph’ feature, which would generate maps of interrelated citations, but this appears to have disappeared for now.

For me, it is much easier to use than Connotea, Nature’s online reference manager, and is much better integrated with online databases, as well as Amazon. You can import bibtex files generated in Endnote or Reference Manager (and export too, although both of these are sometimes less straightforward than they might be) and use the rss feeds for dynamically updating course websites or blogs (like this).

Its just been reviewed at ‘Inside Higher Ed’ below, and as more people use it, can only improve.

Keeping Citations Straight, and Finding New Ones :: Inside Higher Ed :: Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education

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Patience is a virtue

However, the best possible introduction to why this website is necessary is provided by cultural anthropologist Mike Wesch’s video about Web 2.0