Social Science Space

Today, and into the future, consulting archival documents increasingly means reading them on a screen. This brings with it opportunity — imagine being able to search for keywords across millions of documents, leading to radically faster search times — but also challenge, as the number of electronic documents increases exponentially.

What is one’s legacy after a half century as an academic? Although it’s not his only legacy, our David Canter considers the ‘archive’ of surveys, old journals, letters and other reputed ‘data’ that makes up a paper simulacrum of the real David Canter.

Sociologist Philip Cohen of the University of Maryland introduces SocArxiv, a fast, free, open paper server to encourage wider open scholarship in the social sciences.