[CITASA] suggestions for PC-related intro

[Ron Anderson]

The book that James Davis wrote for his course in the 1980s was 
SOCIAL DIFFERENCES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICA. For many years he ran an 
NSF sponsored workshop on his teaching philosophy and using the 
program he and his associates designed, called Chip or Chipendale. 
Dozens of books and work books were published on analyzing particular 
data and specific research questions. Sociologist Gregg Lee Carter 
(Bryant University) alone published at least 10 of these books and 
perhaps is still  churning them out. Allyn and Bacon was (is?) his 
publisher.  I believe that newer versions of these books may use the 
SDA, online software package instead of giving students a program and 
their own data sets.

A parallel development during the 1980s and 90s was the MicroCase 
program originally developed by Rod Stark and Lynne Roberts, who sold 
it to Wadsworth. Wadsworth still makes it available with some of 
their textbooks. MicroCase makes it easy for instructors as well as 
students to prepare graphs and tables for presentations.

In the late 1990s, John Robinson got an NSF grant to assemble all 
kinds of data files and software tools for social data analysis on a 
web site called webuse:
http://www.webuse.umd.edu/
For 4 or 5 years he gave annual workshops to graduate students in how 
to use these resources. A huge number of data sets, tools, and links, 
still reside on his website, although it has not been kept up to date.

The only such project that I know of that has been kept up to date is 
Andy Beveridge's Social Explorer:
http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/home/home.aspx
To get full access to all the data, there is a fee, but there is a 
free trial, and I doubt that the cost for a sociology class would be 
outlandish.

I got an NSF grant 15-20 years ago to develop something like Second 
Life for sociology students. The software technology for simulated 
environments had not yet matured enough to make it feasible and the 
project flopped. Now I think it would work, but alas I am retired and 
have other priorities. In my opinion, there is still an unfortunate 
void in software tools and environments for sociology (and other 
social science) students. Someone(s) should get grants to do some 
creative, innovative tools for learning sociology in the era of 
Internet clouds and rich data resources.
Ron Anderson



At 11:43 AM 8/30/2009, Barry Wellman wrote:
>1. James Davis (Dartmouth, then Harvard) used to teach an intro course
>based on analyzing survey data. This was 20-35 years ago, using mainframes
>and primitive command-line software. I once replicated it with a small
>intro class of 30 and it went well. Should go better with SPSS
>point-click, as long as you stick to freqs & xtabs: graphs & tables. I
>think Jim did a book on this, but I forget the name (:
>
>2. We give a Many Eyes assignment in my 3rd year course. Many Eyes is an
>IBM Visual Labs (name?) contribution that hangs up a lot of data sets, and
>some tools for visualizing and analyzing it.
>
>Whatever you do, I hope you have TA backup, as this always takes a lot of
>hand-holding. But it is gratifying when they "get it".
>
>  Barry Wellman
>  _______________________________________________________________________
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Ronald E Anderson, Professor Emeritus, U. of Minnesota, Mpls, MN 
55455 <rea at umn.edu>
Web site: http://www.soc.umn.edu/~rea/         Blog: http://contexts.org/eye/