Course Materials for:

Sociology 197e/281, Mathematical Sociology seminar.

Prof. David D. McFarland, Spring 1997

The seminar's focus Spring 1997 is the World Wide Web as a publishing outlet for Mathematical Sociology or other technical material. But we start off with preliminaries about the Web, and about more straightforward Web publication.

Preliminaries; Introduction to the World Wide Web

• Contents (this document)
• Syllabus
• A Quick Trip Around the World Wide Web, focusing on data archives and research centers, and some universities, with particular attention to those that provide social science data over the internet.

Rudimentary Web Publishing

• Introduction to Hypertext and HTML.
• Image files: GIF and JPEG formats.
• Image file sources: scanning of paper images; digitized photographs; screen capture.
• File size and download time; resolution, cropping, flattening color depth
• Some of us will be "beta testers" for the planned Bruin OnLine web service.
• Legal and ethical standards. Be sure to read the UCLA Acceptable Use Policy.

Technical Web Publishing

• Tables, diagrams
• Character sets:
  • 7-bit ascii, the keyboard character set
  • 8-bit Latin-1, the western European languages character set, the default for Web browsers.
  • For the future, here is the web page of the Unicode Consortium, an international organization that is working on a 16-bit successor that will handle 65,000 characters, enough for all the world's languages with room left over for some other things such as mathematical symbols. But unicode is still a few years away from being a product you can actually buy and use.
  • Meanwhile, Symbol has the entire Greek alphabet and the most frequently used mathematical symbols, and can be used with Adobe PostScript or Acrobat, and with Ghostscript.
  • An even more extensive set of mathematical symbols is available in TeX (pronounced like the first syllable of "technical"), a technical typesetting system.
• Special formatting requirements for mathematical materials. These include such items as fractions or matrices that take more than one line, multiple level sub- and superscripts, and display equations (contrasted with inline equations).
• TeX mathematical typesetting software.
• Putting mathematical materials on the web:
  • Proposed HTML3.0 <MATH> was never adopted, and was omitted from HTML3.2
  • Workarounds include DVIscope, latex2html, WebEQ, as well as gifs from screen capture.
  • HTML4 proposal tries again. Again, that's for the future, maybe.
  • Meanwhile, review the links to ascii and Symbol for examples of what can be done now.
• That's already more than can be covered in one term, although there are numerous further topics related to the web, including animation and sound. But at least this should be a good beginning.

• web pages posted by students in the seminar.
• professor's home page