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 > _______________________________________________________________________ > > S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC NetLab Director > Department of Sociology 725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388 > University of Toronto Toronto Canada M5S 2J4 twitter:barrywellman > http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman fax:+1-416-978-3963 > Updating history: http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php > _______________________________________________________________________ > > > >_______________________________________________ >CITASA mailing list >CITASA@list.citasa.org >http://list.citasa.org/mailman/listinfo/citasa_list.citasa.org Ronald E Anderson, Professor Emeritus, U. of Minnesota, Mpls, MN 55455 <rea@umn.edu> Web site: http://www.soc.umn.edu/~rea/ Blog: http://contexts.org/eye/