Elise Kramer, Google Science, Cornell Daily Sun, November 16, 2005. Excerpt:
When it comes to the social sciences, however, Google serves an entirely different sort of purpose. While it is excellent for tracking down facts, figures, and research articles — all of which involve its capacity as a referrer to other sources of information — it also serves as a source of original information in its own right. It’s an index of nearly everything written in the public domain of the Internet, and as such it can provide information about the information that’s available — “meta-information,” if you will....No other corpus of human expression is so massive, so diverse, and so easily searchable as Google’s database, which is what makes it a useful tool for social science research. One domain in which Google can be used is anthropology, following cultural trends and assessing values....If linguistics is more your thing, Google’s index of billions of webpages provides insight into how people across the globe use written language. A variety of academics at the Language Log, a linguistics blog, use Google to assess common usage — for example, how often the word “guttural” is used incorrectly (pretty often), or whether people more frequently say “in the circumstances” or “under the circumstances”....Or maybe you’re interested in sociological research....I set up a crude correlational experiment; the question I was interested in was whether name was correlated with later intelligence. More specifically, I wondered whether men who went by nicknames instead of full names were likely to be dumber; stereotypes suggest that a “Joseph” is much more likely to have a college degree and a white-collar job, while a “Joey” is more likely to have a Looney Tunes tattoo. In order to do this, I selected the top ten names for baby boys in 1984, under the assumptions that A) it takes a good 20 years to establish oneself among one’s peers as dumb and B) using very common names is more likely to generate hits that refer to random people, as opposed to using a name like “Orlando” or “Keanu.” Then, for each name, I performed four Google searches: “[name] is a genius,” “[name] is an idiot,” “[nickname] is a genius,” and “[nickname] is an idiot.”...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/16/2005 10:43:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
