About a month ago, over 100,000 people began working for the 2010 Census . The upcoming census has already been generating news in some states, partly because of a concern that some immigrant populations will be undercounted. Why am I thinking about the 2010 Census? Well, we recently uploaded a new article, Leaving Gateway Metropolitan Areas in the United States: Immigrants and the Housing Market , by Gary Painter of USC and Zhou Yu, an Assistant Professor in Family and Consumer Studies here at The University of Utah. The article details where the new emerging immigrant gateways are in the United States and also presents some surprising findings related to immigrant populations and homeownership. The data used for the article was from the 2000 Census. Now as we prepare for 2010, I’m wondering what the newest census data will yield for scholars like Painter and Yu.
Data are at the heart of any discipline no matter if its chemistry, nursing, education, ophthalmology, social work, fine arts or business. Understanding the data, interpreting them and deriving meaning will, of course, depend on those working within the discipline. A research team at the University of Utah was formed to explore these notions by looking for new ways of gathering data across disciplines and finding ways of visualizing them for end users. The team–called Center for the Representation of Multi-Dimensional Information (CROMDI)–received grants from both the National Institutes of Health and the State of Utah to work on the “the display of information in five domains: anesthesiology, finance, process control, network security and monitoring, and live art performance.” The project cyberPRINT was a result of this group as well as numerous journal articles and performances. The most recent journal article, “Between art, science and technology: data representation architecture,” can be found in the U Scholar Works collection of USpace: http://content.lib.utah.edu/u?/ir-main,14299
Before I get to the article of the day, I thought I would give a brief overview of what USpace is. It’s a digital collection of scholarly materials produced at The University of Utah. Our goal is to collect and archive these materials–the U’s “intellectual capital”–and make them freely available on the Internet.
One of our USpace collections, UScholar Works, showcases the work of our faculty and researchers. We approach faculty at the U and request their permission to archive their articles. Sometimes we aren’t able to archive all of a faculty member’s works in UScholar Works because we can’t get permission from some publishers, but we persevere.
Really, you could call us hunter-gatherers. We hunt through faculty vitas and websites in search of articles. We use UScholar Works as a place to gather those materials and share them with the world. Anyone, anywhere, can visit the site and search any subject or phrase, say, “hunter-gatherers,” and find some of what U faculty has produced on that subject.
So, that brings me to the article of the day, by Dr. Kristen Hawkes, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology: Why Hunter-Gatherers Work: An Ancient Version of the Problem of Public Goods. Drawing on her fieldwork with the Ache of eastern Paraguay and Hadza of northern Tanzania, Dr. Hawkes offers an alternative hypothesis on differential resource sharing of hunter-gatherers, looking at the issue of why hunter-gatherers share some categories of foods more widely than others. Are you curious to know some more? Check it out in USpace.