Websites 2010

With an ever-increasing number of websites devoted to geographical matters (in the broadest sense), this new section of the Journal of Latin American Geography profiles websites that may be useful sources of information for teaching and research. In addition to traditional websites, both blogs and social bookmarking sites have proliferated in recent years. On these sites, you can bookmark specific websites, provide tags/keywords for websites, share these sites with friends and colleagues, write descriptions of the sites, and browse various tags. The goal of this JLAG initiative is to profile approximately ten sites recommended by CLAGistas each issue, with a database of websites located on the CLAG website and updated twice yearly. Descriptions of the profiled sites are drawn from the website home pages and from individual contributors. Subscribers to JLAG are encouraged to submit suggestions for inclusion in this section to the websites editor.

(1) http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/

This site allows a researcher to enter Hispanic surnames (and others) and see their distribution within the European origin area, as well as within Latin America and elsewhere. The site holds data for approximately 300 million people in 26 countries, which represents a total population of 1 billion people in those countries. There are 8 million unique surnames and 5 million unique forenames in the database. The roots of the names are derived using the OnoMap classification of names (www.onomap.org), which classifies names into groups of common cultural, ethnic, and linguistic origin using surnames and forenames. The distribution maps are presented at varying scales and provide clear evidence of patterns of colonialism and international migration.

(2) www.nacla.org

Founded in 1966, the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) is an independent, nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide information and analysis on the region, and on its complex and changing relationship with the United States, as tools for education and advocacy in order to foster knowledge beyond borders. NACLA publishes a magazine (Report on the Americas), provides up-to-date online news from myriad sources, and offers information by sub-region and by theme. Its latest initiative is Media Accuracy on Latin America (http://www.mediaaccuracy.org/), which seeks to foster public discourse by offering more pluralistic views on events unfolding throughout the hemisphere. With a wide network of scholars, journalists, and activists who generate constructive media criticism of news coverage, MALA's goal is to highlight reports where news outlets have simplified, overlooked, or distorted critical facts. It also focuses on reports in which the media has failed to connect relevant U.S. policy to developments in Latin America.

(3) http://guadalajara.tierraplan.com

This GIS-based website allows researchers to evaluate any proposed new land use in the metropolitan area of Guadalajara, Mexico. Additional map layers and thematic maps assist in analyzing the social geography of the city. Researchers can select a location on the dynamic map in order to consider new retail, industrial, housing or service units, or they can view additional map layers and thematic maps to assist in analyzing the social geography of the area. This planning tool can help to determine whether new land use is compatible with nearby existing land uses. The impact report can define demographic and economic information for the immediate surrounding area and a ranking for the land use impact that can be used as a preliminary evaluation of the suitability for a proposed land use for the selected site. The project was first developed by Kevin Knapp for an M.A. in Applied Geography at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Description of the project was presented at the ESRI Users Conference for Latin America in Bogotá, Colombia, in October 2009, and also published here:

Harner, John P., and Kevin Knapp. 2009. Advances in Web-Assisted Planning Tools: A Land Use Impact Calculator for Guadalajara, Mexico. Journal of Urban Design 14(4): 557–563.

(4) http://www.diigo.com/ http://delicious.com/

Social bookmarking services like diigo.com and delicious.com allow users to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. With emphasis on the power...