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Social Explorer
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EZproxy
Social Explorer is a subscription service that Fondren Library pays for so that any Rice-affiliate can use it for free. Any time you are on campus, you can go directly to the website (link) and get started right away. However, for any faculty, staff, or off-campus students would like to access Social Explorer at home, you will need to navigate from Fondren’s website to verify that you’re affiliated with Rice. We’ll practice that method of accessing Social Explorer today.
Begin by opening a web browser. In the search bar, type library.rice.edu. This will take you straight to Fondren’s website. Underneath the Search Bar, you will see 4 drop-down options: Catalog, Journals, Databases, and Research Guides. Click the drop-down arrow for Databases and type in Social Explorer. Social Explorer is the first result so go ahead and click it. At this point, if you were off campus, you would be prompted to enter your netID and password.
You can double-check whether you are logged into Rice’s Professional Plan in 2 ways: there should be a pop-up window on the bottom-right hand corner or the top-right hand corner in the teal ribbon should read “Professional plan provided by Rice University”. For now, choose Use as a guest. You will still have access to the features, but you won’t be able to save your work. Creating an account will allow you to save your projects.
Maps
Social Explorer offers data in two forms, as a map and as a table. The mapping features are useful for creating basic maps for quick export or visualization, but for more advanced processing, we use tabular data imported into GIS. However, regardless of your ultimate intentions, I recommend starting with the mapping feature. This gives you an interactive method of exploring your data, seeing preliminary trends, and really seeing if your data is interesting before you begin any cumbersome processing.
So let’s get started by clicking on the Explore Maps tab at the top-left of your screen. We’ll spend our time in U.S. Demography, so click the first Explore icon. If it prompts you to take a tour, click skip. I promise that I’ll be more thorough than the tour.