The Scout Report for Social Sciences - January 26, 1999


The Scout Report for Social Sciences

January 26, 1999

A Publication of the Internet Scout Project
Computer Sciences Department, University of Wisconsin-Madison

The target audience of the new Scout Report for Social Sciences is faculty, students, staff, and librarians in the social sciences. Each biweekly issue offers a selective collection of Internet resources covering topics in the field that have been chosen by librarians and content specialists in the given area of study.

The Scout Report for Social Sciences is also provided via email once every two weeks. Subscription information is included at the bottom of each issue.

In This Issue

Research

Learning Resources

Current Awareness

New Data

In The News


Research

International Boundary News Database -- IBRU
http://www-ibru.dur.ac.uk/database/data.html
The International Boundaries Research Unit (IBRU) at the University of Durham maintains the International Boundary News Database, which consists of more than 10,000 documents related to international boundaries, "including their delimitation, demarcation and management." The documents, spanning from 1991 to the present, are compiled from news sources worldwide. The database may be queried through a simple keyword search or via the Boundary Field, which retrieves all records associated with an international boundary. Searches yield summarized news items, generally one paragraph in length. [AO]
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US Federalism
http://www.min.net/~kala/fed/
Created by Kala Ladenheim of the School of Business and Public Management at George Washington University, this new site contains a comprehensive collection of original hypertext essays and annotated Internet resources relevant to US Federalism, focusing on the relationship between the national government and state governments. Several dimensions of Federalism are examined in five discrete sections: philosophical, historical, economic, political, and administrative. Each section contains a scholarly essay appended with an annotated list of links. Also included at the site are special essays on devolution and electronic democracy as they relate to Federalism. [AO]
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Internet Resources on Genocide and Mass Killings
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide.htm
Internet Resources on Genocide and Mass Killings is an extensive compilation of primary materials and annotated links related to "twentieth-century genocidal and mass man-made killing occurrences." Divided into fifteen sections, subject coverage includes topics such as The Jewish Holocaust, War Crimes and Criminals, Yugoslavia and Kosovo, among others. Most of the original documents in the compilation have been uploaded to the site, facilitating navigation and research. Documents not residing at the site are linked via succinct annotations. The compilation is searchable and updated continuously by its creator Dr. Stuart D. Stein, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Psychology at the University of West England. [AO]
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Kime's International Law Directory 1999
http://www.smlawpub.co.uk/kimes/
The Internet version of Kime's International Law Directory 1999, published by Sweet & Maxwell, lists legal practitioners from nearly 650 law firms in about 250 nations worldwide. Users may conduct cross-field searches on Practitioner/ Practice Name, Country/ Region, City/ Town, Language, and Type of Work. Pull-down menus adjacent to search fields help users to identify controlled terms. Search results yield contact information, legal specializations, languages spoken, and relevant reading. In addition, the directory includes a Country Notes section, which gives an overview of the legal systems in all countries covered. Summary information for each nation includes the designation of legal practitioners, the professional legal education required, the names of professional associations, the official language(s), and a very brief history of the judicial system. [AO]
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Bibliographies for Archaeological Research
http://www.mtsu.edu/~kesmith/TNARCHNET/Pubs/Res_Bib.html
Maintained by Dr. Kevin E. Smith, Associate Professor of Anthropology at Middle Tennessee State University, this Web page collocates over 140 recently compiled bibliographies pertinent to archaeological research. Bibliographies are categorized into fifteen sections covering topics such as historical archaeology, lithic studies, dating techniques and methods, GIS and remote sensing methods, archaeological theory, zooarchaeology, bioarchaeology, regional and site bibliographies, and several others. [AO]
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Inter-American Human Rights Database
http://www.wcl.american.edu/pub/humright/digest/
The Inter-American Human Rights Database is an ongoing initiative of the Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at the American University's Washington College of Law. The database is comprised of documents, in both English and Spanish, ratified by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, beginning with the commission's inception in 1960 and spanning to the present. The chronologically arranged documents include the commission's annual reports, sessional reports, and special situational reports. Currently, not all documents adopted by the commission are available. In the future, the site will include special country reports and thematic reports. All content at the site is searchable. [AO]
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Two New JSTOR Titles
Reviews in American History
http://www.jstor.org/journals/00487511.html
International Organization
http://www.jstor.org/journals/00208183.html
Participating JSTOR Sites:
http://www.jstor.org/about/charter.html
JSTOR has recently added a history title and a political science title to its collection of full-text online journals. Reviews in American History, published by Johns Hopkins University Press includes volumes 1-22, 1973-1994. International Organization, a leading scholarly journal of international affairs published by MIT Press, includes volumes 1-47, 1947-1993. Note: access to JSTOR content is currently available only on a site license basis to academic institutions. A list of institutions with site licenses is available. [AO]
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Learning Resources

The CIOS/ McLuhan Website Project [JavaScript]
http://www.cios.org/encyclopedia/mcluhan/index.html
Created by the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship (CIOS), the CIOS/ McLuhan Website Project aims to be a hypermedia education resource, introducing students to communication studies through the work of Canadian theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan. This informative, well-designed site exemplifies the rationale behind McLuhan's oft-quoted aphorism: "the medium is the message." The site is comprised of four engaging sections: M, Probe, Explorations, and Collide-Oscope. M provides a brief history of McLuhan's life and work as well as a bibliography. Probe, an interactive tutorial section, contains four modules introducing the ideas and concepts of the "Toronto School" of communication studies. Explorations offers four case studies in modern media, allowing students to apply what they learned in the Probe modules. Collide-Oscope, which is currently in development, will be an educational game, teaching students about McLuhan's four laws of media. [AO]
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Akan Cultural Symbols Project
http://www.marshall.edu/akanart/
The Akan are an ethnolinguistic group of peoples who inhabit Ghana and La Cote d'Ivoire on the Guinea Coast of Africa. Throughout their rich cultural history, the Akan have "incorporated [their] ideographic and pictographic writing systems in their arts," and the Akan Cultural Symbols Project is an initiative designed to explore the "relationships between Akan visual arts and Akan verbal genres." The project Website provides numerous symbolic images and detailed information about Akan symbols related to cosmology, economics, views on knowledge, and political beliefs, and explains how the symbols are used in Akan architecture, cloth, wood carvings, and metal casting. The site also includes a comprehensive Akan art bibliography. This project was developed at Marshall University by Dr. George F. Kojo Arthur, Associate Professor of Education, and Robert E. Rowe, Professor of Art. [AO]
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The Photography Collection -- DPL, Western History/ Genealogy Department
http://gowest.coalliance.org/
The Photodigitization Project, an initiative of the Western History/ Genealogy Department of the Denver Public Library, catalogs, archives, and provides public access to an extensive collection of digitized photographs. Recently, the DPL made this database of images available on the Internet. Currently, the database contains more than 50,000 high-resolution images documenting the history of Colorado and the American West. The DPL intends to have over 95,000 images in the database by the year 2000. Users may browse the collection in the Gallery section or search the database via a sophisticated interface. The Search page allows Boolean and wildcard searches and provides options to save, manage, and email search results. [AO]
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Jung Index
http://www.jungindex.net/
Compiled by Matthew Clapp of the University of Georgia, the Jung Index is a collection of more than 300 online resources about and related to the life and work of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who founded analytic psychology. Resources are indexed into ten major topic areas and include sections such as Research Resources, Jungian Psychology, and Psychoanalysis, among others. A What's New? section, a What's Cool? section, and the JungNet Newsletter keep frequent visitors up to date on the latest and greatest resources in analytic psychology. In addition, the site provides a glossary of Jungian terms, a gallery of Jungian images, and a moderated forum for Jungian discussion. [AO]
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Black Archives of Mid-America
http://www.blackarchives.org/
The Black Archives of Mid-America, located in Kansas City, Missouri, was founded to collect and preserve the cultural history of African-Americans in the Midwest, particularly in the states of Missouri, Kansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma. With funding from the Missouri State Library, the Black Archives have collaborated with the Kansas City Public Library to digitize its collection. Heretofore, the ongoing digitization project has developed a database of more than 800 online images that chronicle the African-American experience. Visitors to this site may browse the archives database by subject area or by material type, which includes photographs, letters, narratives, documents, articles, artifacts, and publications. [AO]
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Encyclopaedia of the Orient [Frames, RealPlayer]
http://i-cias.com/e.o/index.htm
Edited by Tore Kjeilen, a Norwegian scholar, the Encyclopaedia of the Orient is an online reference work that provides information on North Africa and the Middle East, encompassing all cultures and nations from "Mauritania in the west and Iran in the east, Turkey in the north and Sudan in south." The encyclopedia, which is updated weekly, contains 500 compendious entries, from Abadan to Zurvanism, comprised of original articles, photographs, graphics, music clips, and pronunciation clips. Users may search the encyclopedia by keyword or browse the entries via the alphabetical index. [AO]
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Hoover Dam -- The American Experience Online, PBS
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/hoover/
The American Experience Online presents this companion site to its recent American Experience film about the one of the greatest hydroengineering feats in history. The Hoover Dam, in Black Canyon on the Colorado River, at the Arizona-Nevada border, was built between 1930 and 1936 and is the highest concrete arch dam in the US. The site provides a program description, an enhanced transcript of the film, a brief bibliography, a list of the dam facts, an essay that explores the economic and environmental effects of the dam, a timeline, a map, a People and Events Database, and a teacher's guide. [AO]
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Resources on the History of Idiocy [Frames]
http://www.dundee.ac.uk/~mksimpso/
Murray K. Simpson, an instructor in the Department of Social Work at the University of Dundee, provides this modest collection of resources on the history of mental deficiency and idiocy (a term which he explains he uses for "historical accuracy"). Resources include two bibliographies, several online texts and articles, and links to additional material.
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Current Awareness
(For links to additional current awareness on tables of contents, abstracts, preprints, new books, data, conferences, etc., visit the Social Sciences Current Awareness Metapage: http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/socsci/metapage/).

Three New Reports from ICG South Balkans Project
Kosovo: Bite The Bullet
http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/projects/sbalkans/reports/kos09main.htm
The State of Albania
http://www.crisisweb.org/projects/sbalkans/reports/alb05mai.htm
Macedonia: New faces in Skopje
http://www.intl-crisis-group.org/projects/sbalkans/reports/mac06main.htm
These three new reports from the International Crisis Group (ICG) provide up-to-date information about the volatile socio-political situation in the South Balkans, specifically in the nations of Albania, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia. The first report offers a comprehensive strategy to resolve the crisis in Kosovo. The second report summarizes the current political, social, and economic conditions in Albania. The third report analyzes the recent parliamentary elections and the change of government in Macedonia. [AO]
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Western Criminology Review
http://wcr.sonoma.edu/
The Western Criminology Review (WCR) is a new scholarly electronic journal sponsored by the Western Society of Criminology. WCR intends to be "a forum for the publication and discussion of theory, research, policy, and practice in the rapidly changing and interdisciplinary fields of criminology and criminal justice." Volume 1, Number 2 (January, 1999) is now available online. [AO]
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Conferences

States of Power: Culture, Governmentality, & Market in Transition -- SCA
http://www.ameranthassn.org/scamtg.htm
May 21-23, 1999. San Francisco, California. "States of Power" is the title for the 1999 meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA). The objective of the conference is "to address the cultural logics of human agency, and of the state, so that economic and political relations of globalization can be brought squarely within the framework of anthropology." The agenda will consist of a keynote lecture, two main sessions, two workshops, and two graduate student panels. An updated conference program is available at the site. [AO]

Women's Political Representation in Eastern Europe: Ten Years After the Fall
http://www.svf.uib.no/admorg/conf99/
May 28-29, 1999. Bergen, Norway. Hosted by the Institute for Administration and Organizational Theory and the Institute of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen, this conference will focus on "women's representation and access to political power in Eastern Europe" in light of the tumultuous political events of the past decade. Proposals for papers are currently being accepted; the deadline is March 1, 1999. More information about the conference locale and schedule are available at the site. [AO]

The Third Annual Conference on Holidays, Ritual, Festival, Celebration, and Public Display
http://www.seeing2020.com/holiday/
May 21-23, 1999. Bowling Green, Ohio. Sponsored by Bowling Green State University's Center for Popular Culture Studies and Department of Popular Culture, this conference will examine issues of power, gender, and performance in "emergent events" such as holiday celebrations, rituals, festivals, and other public displays. Proposal submissions for potential presenters are due April 1, 1999. [AO]
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Job Guides/Funding

H-Net Job Guide
http://www.matrix.msu.edu/jobs/

Chronicle of Higher Education Job Openings
Humanities
http://chronicle.com/free/jobs/faculty/humanities/links.html
Social Science
http://chronicle.com/free/jobs/faculty/sscience/links.html

Jobs in Archaeology -- archaeologic.com
http://archaeologic.com/jobs_in_archaeology.htm

Research and Training Support -- The American Political Science Association
http://www.apsanet.org/PS/grants/
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New Think Tank Policy Papers and Briefs

Greenstein, Robert and Iris J. Lav. "Proposed 10% Tax Rate Cut Would Provide Little Relief to Millions of Families" -- Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
http://www.cbpp.org/1-21-99tax10.htm

Moon, Marilyn. "Growth in Medicare Spending: What Will Beneficiaries Pay?" -- The Urban Institute
http://www.urban.org/health/medicare_growth.html
---. "Restructuring Medicare: Impacts on Beneficiaries" -- The Urban Institute
http://www.urban.org/health/medicare_restructuring.html

Ochmanek, David A., et al. "How Advances in Information and Firepower Can Transform Warfare" -- RAND
http://www.rand.org/publications/RB/RB51/

O'Hanlon, Michael and Jerre Wilson. "Shoring Up Military Readiness" -- The Brookings Institution
http://www.brookings.edu/comm/PolicyBriefs/Pb043/pb43.htm

Yates, Stephen J. "China's Democracy Crackdown Demands a Presidential Response" -- The Heritage Foundation
http://www.heritage.org/library/execmemo/em567.html
.pdf version:
http://www.heritage.org/library/execmemo/pdf/em_567.pdf
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New Tables of Content/ Abstracts

D-Lib Magazine [full-text]
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january99/01contents.html
European Review of History
http://www.carfax.co.uk/erh-con.htm
IASSIST Quarterly (International Association for Social Science Information Service & Technology) [full-text, .pdf 770K]
http://datalib.library.ualberta.ca/iassist/iqVol214.pdf
International Journal of Communications Law and Policy [full-text]
http://www.digital-law.net/IJCLP/2_1999/index.html
Midcontinental Journal of Archaeology [abstracts]
http://www.uiowa.edu/~osa/publica/mcja/mcja23_2.htm
Religion, State & Society
http://www.carfax.co.uk/rss-con.htm
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New Data

Compendium of Federal Justice Statistics, 1996 -- BJS [.pdf, .zip]
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cfjs96.htm
Recently released by the US Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, this report presents an overview of case processing in the Federal criminal justice system for 1996. The report describes all aspects of processing, including numbers of persons prosecuted, convicted, acquitted, incarcerated, sentenced to probation, released pretrial, and under parole or other supervision. Some of the findings for the 1996 report reveal that 86 percent of all defendants were convicted in US district court, and 41 percent of all felony convictions were drug defendants, while only 6 percent of felony convictions were for violent offenses. Users may download the full report in .pdf format (564K) or as an ASCII file with no tables. Alternately, users may download each of the report chapters separately in .pdf format and download the corresponding data in a zipped archive (.zip) of Lotus 123 spreadsheets (.wk1). [AO]
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Churches and Church Membership in the United States, 1990 -- ARDA
By state:
http://www.arda.tm/archive/CMS90ST.html
By county:
http://www.arda.tm/archive/CMS90CNT.html
These two data sets recently posted by the American Religion Data Archive (ARDA) (see the December 11, 1998 Scout Report) present statistics by county and by state for over 130 Judeo-Christian church bodies in the US, providing data with over 400 variables on churches and their members. The data may be downloaded in MicroCase 4.0, SPSS, or ASCII format. Users may view the codebooks online or download them as ASCII files. In addition, users may conduct custom analyses of study variables via an online interface for both data sets. [AO]
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1992-1997 National Election Studies Combined File
http://www.umich.edu/~nes/studyres/nes92_97/nes92_97.htm
The National Election Studies (NES), located within the Center for Political Studies at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, conducts national surveys of the American electorate in presidential and midterm election years. Recently, NES provided a data file combining all of the variables for six election studies conducted between 1992 and 1997. The combined data set consists of 4,474 variables for 2,439 cases and is available for download in raw ASCII format. Users may also obtain an ASCII codebook as well as SAS and SPSS data definition statements to create system files for analysis. [AO]
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In The News

Challenge to the Child Online Protection Act
The Child Online Protection Act -- US House of Representatives
ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c105/h3783.eh.txt
Committee on Commerce Report on the Child Online Protection Act -- US House of Representatives
ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/cp105/hr775.txt
ACLU v. Reno, Round 2 -- American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org/features/f101698a.html
ACLU v. Reno II: The Legal Challenge to the Child Online Protection Act -- Electronic Privacy Information Center
http://www.epic.org/free_speech/copa/
Constitutional Analysis of the Child Online Protection Act -- Center for Democracy and Technology
http://www.cdt.org/speech/constitutional.html
Fact Sheet on the Child Online Protection Act -- US Representative Michael G. Oxley
http://www.house.gov/oxley/copa-tp.htm
"Internet Censorship: Protecting the Children or Restricting the Rights of Adults?" -- Free Radio! The Freedom Forum Online [RealPlayer]
http://webevents.broadcast.com/freedomforum/jan99/freeradio990105a.ram
Internet Free Expression Alliance
http://www.ifea.net/
This week's In the News focuses on the disputed Child Online Protection Act (COPA). These eight resources provide news, commentary, analysis, and primary material. Last Wednesday in a US District Court in Philadelphia, proceedings began in a hearing that will determine the future of the controversial COPA. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Clinton last October as part of an omnibus budget bill that allocated $500 billion for fiscal 1999, COPA requires commercial Web publishers to verify the age of Internet users who wish to access material deemed to be "harmful to minors." However, COPA has not yet taken effect because it has been suspended since last November under a preliminary injunction that questions the law's constitutionality in regard to the First Amendment. The current hearing is to resolve whether or not the injunction will be extended. The challenge to COPA, which claims a violation of free speech and personal privacy rights, was filed jointly by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) on behalf of seventeen groups and businesses, including booksellers, news media, medical professionals, and gay rights organizations. In defense of the law, the US Department of Justice asserts that COPA is necessary to protect children from mature online content that lacks "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." If the injunction is not upheld by the court, COPA will go into effect February 1 and transgressors of the law could receive up to six months in jail and a $50,000 fine for each day of violation, in addition to civil penalties. COPA is the second significant attempt made by Congress to legislate the protection of children in cyberspace. In June 1997, the US Supreme Court overturned the online censorship provisions of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA). The constitutionality of COPA, which has been dubbed CDA II, ultimately may be decided in the Supreme Court as well.

The full text of the Child Online Protection Act and the US House of Representatives Committee on Commerce's report on the law is available from THOMAS, the legislative information service provided by the Library of Congress. The ACLU posts the latest news and the full text of case documents in the COPA case, also known as ACLU v. Reno II. The EPIC Website, devoted to civil liberties in cyberspace, contains a COPA trial page, summarizing the daily events of the hearing. The Center for Democracy and Technology offers a constitutional analysis of COPA, concluding that the Court will strike it down as unconstitutional. US Representative Michael G. Oxley (R-Ohio), who sponsored COPA in the House, has provided a fact sheet on COPA for his constituents. Free Radio!, an audio Webcast of the Freedom Forum Online, hosted a discussion of the Child Online Protection Act and its implications for free speech. Panelists in the discussion include representatives from the Cato Institute, Family Friendly Libraries, the National Law Center for Children and Families, and the Freedom Forum. The Internet Free Expression Alliance -- a consortium of "Internet users, online publishers, library and academic groups and free speech and journalistic organizations" -- has created a site that provides the latest news as well as linking to information resources that educate users about First Amendment issues ion the Internet. [AO]
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