Articles in "Research"

We recently came across a USC Dornsife Study that has revealed a connection between experience in labor unions and the tendency toward civic participation among Latino immigrants in the United States. The study suggests that labor union participation contributes to the political incorporation of Latino immigrant parents by helping them overcome barriers to civic participation that are related to their class and immigrant backgrounds.

In a first step toward providing community leaders with tools for assessment and planning, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences (IMLS) recently released a preview of Building Digitally Inclusive Communities: A guide to the proposed framework.

Recently, a team of students from the School of Information at University of California in Berkley, working on their final master project, enlisted the help of San Fransisco residents to find out how people see vs. imagine their city. The purpose of this research? To discover whether an age old process in planning, such as Mental Mapping can be combined with today’s digital mapping tools tools (ie: GIS ) to create a balance of accuracy and precision, truth and objectivity using unconventional combinations of techniques and imagination that comes from access to “local' knowledge of any respective place.

In some ways, I was an unlikely choice to write a report on Using Online Tools to Engage –and be Engaged by – the Public. My work has centered mainly on face-to-face forms of public engagement. I had only just begun to use a Facebook page to distribute updates and resources to practitioners and researchers. I had to do most of the research on online tools from scratch. I was vaguely suspicious of Facebook status updates, RSS feeds, and (above all) Twitter.