National Archives: Olympic record
http://nationalarchives.gov.uk/olympics/ A specialist section of pages created by the National archives to highlight their Olympic and Paralympic games holdings. Explore the timeline to see great examples of online primary source materials from 1896-2012. These include photos, manuscripts and government papers relating to Olympic organisation, finance and participation. See the British Foreign Office dispatch from first […]
2011 National Human Development Report for Russia
http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/national/europethecis/russia/name,24360,en.html Find out more about socio-economic conditions in Russia by reading this major new report. Prepared by the Faculty of Economics at Lomonosov Moscow State University. Focus is upon modernization and human development. Covers changes to the economy, organization of economic life. Also useful is the Nations in Transit report from Freedom House. http://www.freedomhouse.org/report-types/nations-transit which […]
18 days in Egypt
http://beta.18daysinegypt.com/ American documentary filmmaker and journalist Jigar Mehta has launched crowd-sourced interactive documentary project aimed at capturing the history of the revolution in Egypt. Explore videos contributed by citizen journalists on the website. Note it seems to load better using Firefox. The site is powered by GroupStream, an innovative new platform for group storytelling.
Social Science Bites
Podcasts of interviews with leading social scientists on different aspects of the social world. Published by Sage. http://www.socialsciencebites.com/
Seven Days of Social Sciences Research
http://www.esrc.ac.uk/publications/multimedia/seven-days/?dm_i=XZA,S380,4OC413,2A2UK,1 New feature on the ESRC website. From 23rd April they will be posting videos text on their website reflecting the breadth of ESRC funded research based on the Monday’s child nursery rhyme. The first instalment fair of face has materials relating to image and identity. http://www.esrc.ac.uk/publications/multimedia/seven-days/monday.aspx
Women in Politics
http://www.iadb.org/research/geppal/index.cfm Spanish language site maintained by the Interamerican Bank and IDEA International, Geppal provides access to an online database with information about women’s political participation in Latin America. It contains the results of surveys from 94 political parties with tables for candidates and participation in party politics. Data collected between 15th January and the 15th October 2009. […]
Charitable giving
For research on charitable giving try these resources. Charities Aid foundation publishes UK giving https://www.cafonline.org/publications/2011-publications/uk-giving-2011.aspx Behaviour can also be compared in the World Giving index https://www.cafonline.org/publications/2011-publications/world-giving-index-2011.aspx Think tank New Philanthropy Capital: http://www.philanthropycapital.org/publications/publications_list.aspx provides free access to many of its reports discussing how charities can make themselves more effective. NCVO has commentary on UK charity policy […]
Technology and protest
Tell Dave protests: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/britains-web-monitoring-plan-draws-comparisons-to-1984-and-kafka/2012/04/02/gIQAbNB5qS_blog.html This month, to protest against new internet monitoring plans, twitter users utilised hashtag #TellDaveEverything. The protest took the form of listing mundane events that they thought they should tell the prime minister about to make the point that the new laws would ‘snoop into everything’. Coverage from CBC Canada captured examples. There […]
Information on development
The African Capacity Building Foundation has a virtual library of documents on poverty reduction in Africa at: http://elibrary.acbfpact.org/ World Bank documents and data can be accessed in the Open Knowledge Repository at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/ CGIAR Virtual information centre http://vlibrary.cgiar.org/V?RN=512253939 Information from the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research – a global partnership that unites organizations engaged in […]
Understanding Society Findings 2012
http://research.understandingsociety.org.uk/findings/findings-2012 Understanding Society contains headline findings from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey. This offers data on 14 topic areas using results from approximately 100,000 individuals in 40,000 households, as well as young people aged 10-15. Topics include social support networks, housework and gender, risky behaviours of 10-15 year olds, population diversity, employment and racial discrimination, immigrants […]

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