Getting and organising good references is the key to creating good bibliographies for academic papers. This is a time consuming and effort-intensive process. This post discusses some tips and tricks to make this process easier and more productive With the dramatic growth of information technology and the internet in particular, information in the hands of researchers has increased dramatically. We now have an opportunity to collect information at rates unthinkable one generation before us. But getting the best out of this information glut requires careful strategies for collecting, organizing and retrieving information. This article reviews a few tools and practices. […]
Academic Themes
Surprisingly few students use citation managers though it can make life so much easier I am always put off at the thought of creating bibliographies with their innumerable dots and commas and italics, and a grammar complicated more than that of German language. I really have no idea why people came up with such complicated formats such as Chicago, APA or MLA. For my first paper that was headed towards publication I followed the style guide. After one year, I realise that I made many mistakes and the process in any case had taken a long time and was frustrating. […]
Speed up citations with bibliography managers
Search debates, policies, laws, parliamentary questions, and other issues relating to policy, politics law and governance in India. Covers Indian Parliament and State Assemblies For those with an interest in policy issues, following what happens in the parliament and the legislative assemblies can be crucial. All state governments and the Government of India have reasonably information websites these days. But it is a little painful if we have to look for a new education initiative in over 50 websites one by one. On the other hand a generic search in Google or other search engines will give a lot of […]
Indian Parliament & Legislative Assemblies search engine
13 Search the debates that helped frame India's far sighted Constitution
Search engine for Constituent Assembly debates in India
An article or book typically fits many categories – it is possible to put one record in multiple folders in Refworks I just discovered a facility in Refworks to put a record in multiple folders. Take a book like India: Development and Participation; I will want it in my ‘development’ folder and also ‘India’ folder. I used to think that I had to duplicate it each time I wanted to put a record in multiple folders. While this would have served the purpose, it becomes a problem when I wish to make editions to the record. Suppose I wish to […]
Associating refworks record with multiple folders
This page gives links to websites of State and Union governments in India with detailed information on budgets. Brief descriptions of sites are given. Despite the importance of budgets, very little information is available about them in the Indian context. The Union budget gets a national coverage and information is widely available. Much less is know about state budgets. The good news is that most state governments now have websites, often with extensive information. As a first step, I’ve put together information on all of them in one place. I updated this page to reflect the websites in February 2011. […]
Union and State budgets, India: Websites, documents, tools
This article has been shifted to my academic blog. Please click here for the post.
Easterly’s critique of cash for condoms: a case of poverty ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here. The argument that Sen makes is complex and I will not attempt to recap them here. But as a pointer, I’ll just mention that this talk is based on his book “Identities and Violence”. Sen questions the notion of Clash of civilisation by Samuel Huntington from different dimensions. He questions if any group of people can be neatly identified as a “civilization”, if animosity has to be the basis of […]
Amartya Sen’s critique of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of civilisations”
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here Justice Henderson started as a sports person and with some mentoring graduated in Law. As he was finishing school he had an interesting offer to work in the Kennedy administration on civil rights issues. The interview interlaces Justice Henderson’s biography with the tumultuous years of civil rights activism in USA. The path he took – African American sports person who finally went on to become a Judge in a US […]
Interesting interview on civil rights with African-American Judge – Justice ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here This is an interview by Harry Kreisler taken in 1983 with Linus Pauling who got two Nobel Prizes, once for chemistry and the second time for peace. The interview is a reflection of the context in which Linus Pauling got into peace activism in the United States. The opinions of Pauling were slightly uncommon to me, atleast from a peace activist. He for example would talk of the importance of […]
The peace movement in historical perspective with Linus Pauling – ...
Many talks and interviews with well known people are now available online. I’ve put together a series of them that I have specially enjoyed. To see the rest, click here Amartya Sen, in my opinion, is the economist who has probed the limits of economics as a discipline. In this interview he talks of nature of theorising, especially in economics, and makes many interesting observations. The interesting feature of Sen’s analysis is that he rarely dismisses the philosophical basis of the discipline. Instead he brings out the limitations involved and the need to bring in greater diversity to the informational […]
Webcast of interview with Amartya Sen: Reflections on theory in ...
Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity Rating: 3 out of 5 Editor: Sheila Whiteley, Andy Bennett, Stan Hawkins Year: 2004 Category: Music, Anthropology, Culture Publisher: Ashgate Publishing The book collects an assortment of articles under three broad heads: (1) music, space and place (2) rap and hip hop – community and cultural identity and (3) musical production and the politics of desire. The introductory chapter is fairly detailed and gives and good outline of all the chapters in the book. It also includes a quick theoretical outline. The first section, which is oriented mostly about issues of […]
Music, Space and Place – A brief description
Death without weeping: The violence of everyday life in Brazil Rating: 4 out of 5 Author: Nancy Schepper-Huges Year: 1992 Category: Anthropology, hunger, violence, poverty Publisher: University of California Press Death without weeping is an ethnographic study of a town in North-Eastern Brazil. The theme of the book is hunger, child deaths and ‘every day violence’ in Brazil. The work is situated in a town she calls ‘Bom Jesus da mata’ in Pernambuco district of N.E. Brazil. The author visited the place first as a volunteer in 1964, and continued her association with the town ever since. After her training […]
Nancy Schepper-Huges’ graphic portrayal of hunger and violance in Brazil
My publications on Tamil Nadu's public services, right to food and other issues.
List of publications
Google scholar and specialized bibliography services like Econlit and JSTOR seem to have different strengths and should be used in different ways I started using Google Scholar with a vengeance when it started. It has an ease that other providers do not: there is no need to log in, there is no need for subscription and it seems to pull out articles that other service providers just did not. In no time, Google Scholar also started providing links to my citation manager – Refworks. But soon I started realising various limitations of Google Scholar. Here’s a brief assessment of the […]
Comparing Google Scholar and specialised bibliographic search engines
This bibliography covers most of the recent and classic works in institutional economics. I’ve included some reviews in the book review section. My other bibliographies can be seen under the bibliography category. Abraham, Anita, and Jean-Philippe Platteau. 2004. Participatory development: Where culture creeps in. In . Acemoglu, Daron. 2005. Politics and economics in weak and strong states. Journal of Monetary Economics 52, (7) (October): 1199-1226. Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2006. Economic origins of dictatorship and democracy. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press. Alston, Lee J., Thráinn Eggertsson, and Douglass Cecil North. 1996. Empirical studies in institutional change. […]
Bibliography of Institutional Economics (downloadable)
I had written a note about using wordnet lexical database that could be used in content analysis. I just stumbled on a lexical database in Hindi. I am yet to try it, but am excited that such a tool is available in an Indian language, specially when I am planing a media study with a friend.
Wordnet lexical database in Hindi
A tool to generate conceptually related set of words for content analysis Wordnet is a lexical database maintained by Princeton university. It is described as: “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English, developed under the direction of George A. Miller. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser” When we with to do autocoding with NVivo or other qualitative research (or content analysis) software, […]
Using Wordnet lexical database with content analysis software
NVivo Rating: 4 out of 5 I started using NVivo – a qualitative research and content analysis software – last year when I worked on a content analysis project. NVivo’s purposes are simple – it allows us to assemble different documents (including pictures) and code them. The codes can be arranged in a hierarchy or individually. While most coding is manual, some of it can be automated (see below). The best part of NVivo is that it allows us to review contents carrying a particular code with ease. For example, I was looking at newspaper articles on contracting and wanted […]
NVivo: Useful content analysis tool
“I put all my shoes in front of me and polished them”, “I cleaned my curtains”, “My house was never as clean as it was when I had to write my dissertation”. These were the most interesting revelations by a panel on surviving the dissertation that was organised as a part of a course I audited recently. The tendency to putt-off writing is just incredible. I never feel prepared enough, and when I do get to writing, I never quite feel as if I’ve done a job good enough. Every now and then I do a reasonable outline but never […]