Brooke’s World

ICPSR Workshop for Students

ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, contains an archive of social science data for research and instruction. The database offers more than 500,000 digital files containing social science research data.

Learn how to use ICPSR to search, download and analyze data online through the ICPSR database. This workshop will introduce you to the various ways to search for data sets, variables and literature related to the data as well as guide you through the download process. Don’t have SPSS, SAS or their equivalents? Learn how to use ICPSR’S SDA to analyze data online.

Open to UAB graduate and undergraduate students. Registration is requested.

To register, or for more information, please contact Brooke Becker at babecker@uab.edu or (205) 934 – 6364.

ICPSR Workshop for Faculty

ICPSR, the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, contains an archive of social science data for research and instruction. The database offers more than 500,000 digital files containing social science research data.

This workshop will give you a brief refresher on searching for data sets, variables and literature related to the data through the ICPSR database as well as providing an overview of the various resources and tools available for teaching undergraduates and graduate students through programs such as the MyClass Project, Teachingwithdata.org and several specific Web-Based Instructional Modules available from ICPSR. We’ll also briefly discuss how to prepare and document your data for preservation with ICPSR.

Open to all UAB faculty. Registration is requested.

To register, or for more information, please contact Brooke Becker at babecker@uab.edu or (205) 934 – 6364.

Mervyn H. Sterne Library cordially invites you to

A Celebration of UAB Diversity

Blending of the Past and the Present:
a discussion of early years of Birmingham and
UAB through the turbulent Civil Rights era

Panel Members
James Baggett
Archivist for the City of Birmingham
Head of Archives and Manuscripts at Birmingham Public Library

Dr. Tennant McWilliams
UAB Professor Emeritus

Ann Gilbert
Local Historian, Genealogist, and Activist

Moderator
Odessa Woolfolk
Educator and Civic Activist
Former Assistant to UAB President for Community Relations

January 25, 2013 at 4 p.m.
Mervyn H. Sterne Library Room 174

Eric Whitacre has created, through the power of composition and social media, an outlet for thousands of voices across the globe to express themselves through song.  Dissonance and harmony created one voice, one video at a time.

In a segment from the TED Weekends series, called “Part of Something Larger Than Ourselves,” Whitacre explains how the idea came to be and how the choir has grown over the last few years. To date, they’ve released three songs, “Lux Aurumque,” “Sleep” and “Water Night.” The fourth is currently in production.

If you’d like to hear a bit more from Mr. Whitacre, feel free to come by the library and check out “The complete a cappella works, 1991-2001”

If you can, take a few minutes today. Listen. Join in the choir if you’d like. Enjoy.

Applications are now bring taken for the 2013 ICPSR Summer Undergraduate Internship Program, an intensive, ten-week program for undergraduate students interested in social science research.

The NSF-funded program matches students with mentors at ICPSR, and supports exploration of a research question from start to finish — including literature searches, data analyses, and creation of conference-ready posters summarizing students’ research findings.

Applications are now being taken through an on-line application portal. Two letters of recommendation are required, and can also be sent over the Web. The deadline is January 31, 2013.

For examples of research projects that 2012 interns completed, see these videos.

The Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom is offering travel grants between the United States and the UK to potential applicants to its Secondary Data Analysis Initiative (see description below). The goal of the travel grant is to help facilitate and develop collaboration between potential UK and US project partners. Ten travel grants are available at a maximum of £1500 (about $2,300 US) for researchers in the US to travel to the UK, or vice versa.  The deadline for expressing interest (this should come from the UK project partner) in a travel grant is Feb. 14, 2012 and all travel must be completed by March 31, 2012. For more information on the travel grants, see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/guidance/applicants/SDAI-travel-grants.aspx.

The Secondary Data Analysis Initiative is a new program from ESRC, the first phase of which will fund about 20 small-scale projects (of 18-months duration and £200,000, or approximately $316,000 US). The aims of the projects are to deliver high-impact policy and practitioner relevant research through deeper exploitation of major data resources of ESCR and other agencies. For more information, see http://www.esrc.ac.uk/funding-and-guidance/funding-opportunities/19214/secondary-data-analysis-initiative-phase-1-2012.aspx.  The deadline for applying for these grants is April 19, 2012. Another round of grants is expected to commence in October.

ESRC holds numerous long-running studies and surveys such as the British Household Panel Survey and the European Social Survey, which will form the foundation of the Secondary Data Analysis Initiative. A detailed Call Specification document (PDF) is available at http://www.esrc.ac.uk/_images/SDAI_Phase_1_2012_Specification_tcm8-19221.pdf.

We all know that census records are not the easiest sources of information in the scholastic world, but the National Archives has put together a series of 5 videos aimed at making the process a little more understandable.

Part of the “Genealogy: Know Your Records” program, the videos include detailed information about the use of census records, military records and immigration records for genealogists, all illustrated by noted archivists.

While these might not be as exciting and cute as the surprised kitten or a double rainbow, they’ll definitely be of use to your future research. When you’re done with the videos, feel free to check out the actual records in Sterne Library. You can begin your search with a quick “Subject” search in our local catalog for the term “United States–Census” to see all the different links for the various editions of the census or you can type the keyword “census” in for a more varied list.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl54NX_H1ko

In the modern world, where protests take place in person as well as through various electronic formats (Facebook, Google, Tweets, etc), how does one even begin to build an archive of historical material? An article, “Data Mining for Instant History” in a December 7th blog post of Prospero in the online edition of The Economist attempts to answer that question.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/12/documenting-occupy-protests

It tells of several collections that have begun archiving materials for the Occupy Wall Street movement and includes several interesting links to sites including the Internet Archive site, http://www.archive.org/details/occupywallstreet as well as the Occupy Archive site created by Sharon Leon, director of public programmes at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for the History of New Media, http://occupyarchive.org/

We’ve heard your requests and made them happen! Mervyn H. Sterne Library will have LATER HOURS beginning with the Fall semester on August 16, 2011!

The library will continue to open at 7:30 Monday through Friday and will now be open until 2 AM Sunday through Thursday. During final exams, the library will be open even longer.

Sterne Library’s first floor North Wing will be available all times the library is open. After midnight, the circulation desk will continue to provide services. Group study rooms, individual study areas, computers, WiFi, printers, copiers, and the browsing periodicals will be available at all hours. The first floor South Wing, second floor, and third floor will close at midnight.

After 10 PM, access to the library will be limited to UAB students, faculty, and staff with a valid UAB ID. Security officers will be checking IDs and enforcing this policy. Be sure to bring your ID!!

The Library will continue its current schedule for Friday and Saturday, except during exams. You can always see the week’s hours on the Sterne Library home page at www.mhsl.uab.edu.

The White House recently announced a new initiative aimed at downsizing the number of .gov sites.  As stated in the Executive Order 13571, “with advances in technology and service delivery systems in other sectors, the public’s expectations of the Government have continued to rise, and that the Government “must keep pace with and even exceed those expectations.”

The full memo is available from The White House

While the title may sound like a version of a Nancy Drew novel, it’s actually the beginning of an amazing true-life tale. Dr. Sarah Parcak (History and Anthropology) and her team have discovered pyramids, tombs and other evidence of ancient life. Utilizing infra-red satellite imagery, Dr. Parcak and her team were able to identify areas that weren’t apparent to the naked eye. Funded by a grant from the BBC, their efforts are featured in an upcoming  documentary called Egypt’s Lost Cities which will be aired in the U.S. sometime in the next year.

As Dr. Parcak indicates, this is a new age for investigative archaeological techniques. “Indiana Jones is old school, we’ve moved on from Indy. Sorry, Harrison Ford.”

For further reading,

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-13522957

http://www.uab.edu/news/latest/item/1287-uab-professor-discovers-lost-pyramids-other-antiquities-in-egypt