Students with research interests in scientific data management, sharing and reuse have a unique opportunity to participate in the Open Data fellowship program. Open Data is an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) sponsored by NSF. Open Data fellows engage in a vibrant set of research activities at the University [...]

Vintage Infographics From the 1930s, Flowing Data (Sept. 11, 2009). Some examples from Willard Cope Brinton’s 1939 book Graphic Presentation. - jim

U-M’s Gutmann to head NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, University of Michigan News Service, July 27, 2009. Gutmann, who specializes in historical demography and population-environment relationships, currently directs the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR). He begins his NSF position Nov. 2. - Jim Jacobs

There was a lot of hype when the new search engine WolframAlpha was launched earlier this year.  An article in the current issue of Technology Review does a better job of explaining how it works and how it fits in with other search engines. It notes that the numeric information it uses is “curated” by [...]

Check out this week’s Fifth Wave cartoon: http://www.gocomics.com/thefifthwave/2009/06/21

05 June 2009 13:19 A week has passed since IASSIST 2009. I hope most of you have made it safely back home by now – and are ready to refresh the memories by watching the conference webcasts and viewing presentations. Webcasts of all three plenaries and Thursday and Friday’s concurrent sessions in the Small Auditorium are [...]

As you may have heard during last week’s wonderful IASSIST meeting in Tampere, there are still spaces available in the ICPSR Summer Program course on DDI, to be held at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, on July 13-16. The course is titled “Documenting Data Using DDI 3.0: Supporting Research, Collection Management, and Access,” and [...]

The IASSIST Quarterly IQ Vol. 31 issue 3&4 is now available on the web: http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iqvol31.html This issue will only be available on the web. There will be no printed version mailed out to the membership. This double issue is the work of the authors and their articles are introduced below. We are presenting an integrated double issue of [...]

Several weeks ago, Google contacted me at BLS to let us know they were using some of our data in a launch of a new service in data visualization.  Their plan is to make as much data available as possible with as rich a tool set as they can provide.  To see an example, enter the [...]

The IASSIST Quarterly (IQ Vol. 31 issue 2 – 2007) is now available on the web: http://iassistdata.org/publications/iq/iqvol31.html This issue will be printed and mailed to the membership. From next issue IASSIST will be saving trees and only publish the IQ on the web. We hope you agree with our decision. Thanks. Some of you are now getting ready [...]

We’ve created a Twitter feed for conference info, updates and impressions. See it at http://twitter.com/IASSIST2009 or  there’s a link on the program page. Before the conference, it will be mostly logistic and planning information.  At the conference, IASSISTers will be tweeting about the conference itself:  comments, suggestions, updates, and other twitter-friendly information. We’ve got a few volunteer [...]