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WISERD Conference 2012: Devolution, Place and Change – Call for Papers
(I weld y dudalen hon yn Gymraeg, cliciwch yma).
WISERD will be holdings its third annual conference in Bangor on 28th and 29th March 2012. The theme of the conference is Devolution, Place and Change.
Keynote speakers confirmed are:
Professor John Curtice (Strathclyde University)
Professor Ron Martin (Cambridge University)
We expect to announce the contribution of another high profile guest very soon.
If you would like to make a submission to be included in conference, please send your abstract to wiserd.events@cardiff.ac.uk by 7 November 2011. Authors of shortlisted abstracts will be informed by 21 November 2011. Bookings for the conference open on 1 December 2011.
As in previous years submissions may take a variety of forms. To view the full text of the call for papers please click here.
Beta Test The New WISERD Geoportal Software
An exciting project at WISERD is encouraging social science researchers to test and review new geoportal software.
The WISERD Geoportal (WGP) initiative aims to develop a web-based software application to enhance a researcher’s ability to discover socio-economic research data relating to Wales.
Run by the WISERD Data Integration Team, the WGP hopes to encourage collaborative research and the re-use of existing data.
Using free and open-source software (FOSS) components and services, a range of software tools have been developed by the team to capture standards compliant metadata for a variety of socio-economic data sources. The WGP provides map-based and text-based search tools for accessing this database.
The unique feature of the WGP is that it is dedicated to supporting quantitative and qualitative social science academic and policy research – something the team hadn’t previously encountered in their review of over 120 geoportals world-wide.
A particularly innovative aspect of the geoportal has involved the building of a rich meta-database of government surveys, geo-referenced semantically-tagged qualitative data (generated from primary research), grey data (from transcripts and journal publications for example), and routinely collected Government administrative data.
From September this year, the team will carry out end-user evaluations of the WGP via a network of testers. Following these evaluations, further developments will be made, with a release version of the WGP launched in December.
For more information please visit the WISERD Geoportal website, or contact the WISERD Data Integration Team at the University of Glamorgan (Dr Robert Berry – raberry@glam.ac.uk or Dr Richard Fry – rfry@glam.ac.uk).
To register as a tester please complete the registration form via the WGP website: http://wiserd.comp.glam.ac.uk/home/
Further information
A video demonstration of the Alpha version (early development stage) of the WGP is available to view, along with a presentation on the development of the WGP, an academic paper on the concept behind the WGP and the latest international conference paper. Please visit the WISERD Geoportal page to access these resources.
