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 »

Through a series of blogs, and videos like the one by Mike Wesch which I introduced elsewhere, anthropology appears to be setting the pace in terms of social science engagement with the internet and the possibilities for collaboration and group work.

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I’m a big fan of podcasts, not least for trying to learn something new while I’m on my bike or the bus. There are an increasing number of great resources available in and around science studies.

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Somehow, this post got lost somewhere between typing and publishing, which would seem to imply I haven’t got a clue what I’m doing.

There is a nice guide (and accompanying lecture) from Princeton which describes how to avoid having to trawl through Google results and instead get searches to work, including how to search only academic or government websites. Perhaps equally impressively (for the easily impressed), it describes how to use Google’s calculator, conversion tools and weather forecasts. I’m not sure how many universities provide this kind of information, but it must be among the most useful to give to todays students and researchers.

And more help and guidance can be found here (pdf)

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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Programs, articles, videos, websites - all can be useful, all will feature.

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