Aaron Erlich

Area proportional to population maps

I was cleaning out my downloads folder, and I remembered I had made this cool map of Kenya that uses the algorithm of Scharl an Weichselbraun to make a density equalizing map of Kenya. This map shows each of Kenya’s counties with the area proportional to the voting age population. You can see how unequal the county sizes are in the map.

deformedMap

 

DistrictMap

Aaron Erlich

Curated websites with lists of data

I am always looking for data. Often, as social scientists, we are looking for data but are not exactly sure what exists or what we need. There should be a set of websites, which curate available datasets and make some commentary on them. These are starting to emerge and are the ones that I have found, which are useful. If you find more, please get in touch, and I will add them to the list.

  • ISA has put together a good list of cross-national dataset, and is adding curatorial commentary.
  • APSA Task Force on Political Violence. A list of datasets related to political violence and terrorism. It doesn’t look like it is being updated.
  • The DEVECONDATA Blog is a good resource for comparative political economy data. There is also useful commentary and the tags are also well laid out.
  • The Electronic Data Center at Emory overlaps a lot with the ISA aggregator. Most of the datasets are cross-national data./li>
  • The Internet Data Sources for Social Scientists has a wide-ranging curation of datasets. Much of the data is much more micro in nature.

Aaron Erlich

Integrating Zotero with LaTeX in Aquamacs/Emacs Using Zotexo

Update: July 6, 2013: You need to change the file to zotelo

(require 'zotelo)
(add-hook 'TeX-mode-hook 'zotelo-minor-mode)

I am a long-time Zotero user, and I found it frustrating that I could not find a way to link  Zotero with LaTeX. Now, I have found one! It’s called Zotexo and can be found here, along with some basic instructions.

For those of you who are slightly less familiar with Emacs/Aquamacs, I wanted to  add to the Zotexo installation instructions.

Step 0

Zotexo works with RefTex, which allows you to grab citations from your .bib file automatically. Luckily, it comes prepackaged with Aquamacs. If you don’t use Aquamacs, you will have to install it.

Step 1

Like Zotero itself, Zotexo is browser dependent and you need to use Firefox. Firefox is slow for a lot of tasks, but I keep it around particularly for its Zotero integration. In order for Zotexo to your you need to install the add-on MozRepl . You need to both install it and turn it on for this to work.

Step 2

Next is the complicated part for Aquamacs/Emacs novices. You have to download zotexo.el (the program file) in a directory the Emacs will search and then write some code that lets Aquamacs/Emacs know it’s there. With Aquamacs the directory where you need to save the file  is:

/Users/UserName/Library/Preferences/Aquamacs Emacs/.

If you have viewing of invisible files turned off, you may need to turn it on (see here)

Step 3

To make Aquamacs know to use zotexo.el, you will need to activate a new zotexo mode. To do this, you need to find where your InitFile is in Aquamacs. This file runs extra commands at the startup of Emacs. In Aquamacs this is quite easy  because it’s located in the same place where you saved zotexo.el  .  If you use emacs, this files is called .emacs. Either way, you need to open this file and plug the two lines of code on vitotshka’s instructions into your InitFiles. Save this file, then close and restart Firefox and Aquamacs.

(require 'zotexo)
(add-hook 'TeX-mode-hook 'zotexo-minor-mode)

NOTE

Often RefTex will not recognize a new bibliography file

Ref –> Reset RefTex Mode will solve your problem. Good luck!