Wired reports that Google plans to release, soon, a framework for hosting, storing, and distributing large or frequently used data. The Project, Palimpsest, will pay the fees to both ship the data (by sending users a 3TB hard drive to download the data) and for hosting. This, if applicable for political science scholars, not only is a good way to reduce the cost of hosting our work, but also to facilitate some sort of centralization that is currently lacking and can often encouraging data seeking via Google anyways.
Link to a slide show about the project (middle of the page).
Thanks to Academic Productivity for the link.
Good idea. Reminds me of ICPSR's data collection project. However, I am still a big fan of scholars having their data available on their own personal websites or on the websites of their departments or organizations. It's quicker and easier to upload data to your own website rather than deal with a third party, the data gets to the public faster than waiting for the third party to upload, and it makes data easier to find because researchers do not have to search through several data collection sites to find it, they already know where it is.
Posted by: Julie | June 15, 2008 at 05:20 PM