All posts by Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Data Management, data science, Data Visualization, workshops

CDVS Data Workshops: Spring 2022

2022-01-10 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

As we begin the new year, the Center of Data and Visualization Sciences is happy to announce a series of twenty-one data workshops designed to empower you to reach your goals in 2022. With a focus on data management, data visualization, and data science, we hope to provide a diverse set of approaches that can save time, increase the impact of your research, and further your career goals.

While the pandemic has shifted most of our data workshops online, we remain keenly interested in offering workshops that reflect the needs and preferences of the Duke research community. In November, we surveyed our 2021 workshop participants to understand how we can better serve our attendees this spring. We’d like to thank those who participated in our brief email survey and share a few of our observations based on the response that we received.

Workshops Formats

While some of our workshops participants (11%) prefer in-person workshops and others (24%) expressed a preference for hybrid workshops, a little over half of the survey respondents (52%) expressed a preference for live zoom workshops. Our goal for the spring is to continue offering “live” zoom sessions while continuing to explore possibilities for increasing the number of hybrid and in-person options. We hope to reevaluate our workshops communities preferences later this year and will continue to adjust formats as appropriate.

Workshop format preferences — 52% of respondents prefer online instruction, while another 24% would like to hybrid options

Participant Expectations

With the rapid shift to online content in the last two years coupled with a growing body of online training materials, we are particularly interested in how our workshop attendees evaluate online courses and their expectations for these courses. More specifically, we were curious about whether registering for an online session includes more than simply the expectation of attending the online workshop.

While we are delighted to learn that the majority of our respondents (87%) intend to attend the workshop (our turnout rate has traditionally been about 50%), we learned that a growing number of participants had other expectations (note: for this question, participants could choose more than one response). Roughly sixty-seven percent of the sample indicated they expected to have a recording of the session available. While another sixty-six percent indicated that they expected a copy of the workshop materials (slides, data, code) even if they were unable to attend.

As a result of our survey, CDVS will make an increasing amount of our content available online this spring.. In 2021, we launched a new webpage designed to showcase our learning materials. In addition to our online learning site, CDVS maintains a github site (CDVS) as well as site focused on R learning materials (Rfun).

We appreciate your feedback on the data workshops and look forward to working with you in the upcoming year!

Duke Libraries, Duke research

CDVS Chat or Zoom for Online Data Advice

2020-10-07 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

As students and classes moved online in the spring of 2020, the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences realized that it was time to expand our existing email (askdata@duke.edu) and lab based consultation services to meet the data demands of online learning and remote projects. Six months and hundreds of online consultations later, we have developed a new appreciation for the online tools that allow us to partner with Duke researchers around the world. Whether you prefer to chat, zoom, or email, we hope to work with you on your next data question!

Chat

Ever had a quick question about how to visualize or manage your data, but weren’t sure where to get help? Having trouble figuring out how to get the data software to do what you need for class/research? CDVS offers roughly thirty hours of chat support each week. Data questions on chat cover our full range of data support. If we cannot resolve a question in the chat session, we will make a referral for a more extended consultation.

Zoom

We’re going to be honest… we miss meeting Duke students and faculty in the Brandaleone Lab in the Edge and consulting on data problems! However, virtual data consultations over zoom have some advantages over an in-person data consultations at the library. With zoom features such as screen sharing, multiple participants, and chat, we can reach both individuals and project teams in a format where everyone can see the screen and sharing resource links is simple. As of October 1st, we have used zoom to consult on questions from creating figures in the R programming languages to advising Bass Connection teams on the best way to visualize their research. We are happy to schedule zoom consultations via email at: askdata@duke.edu.

Just askdata@duke.edu

Even with our new data chat service and video chat services, we are still delighted to advise on questions over email at askdata@duke.edu. As the days grow shorter this fall and project deadlines loom, we look forward to working with you to resolve your data challenges!

data science, Duke research, workshops

Fall 2020 – CDVS Research and Education During COVID-19

2020-08-20 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

The Center for Data and Visualization Sciences is glad to welcome you back to a new academic year! We’re excited to have friends and colleagues returning to the Triangle and happy to connect with Duke community members who will not be on campus this fall.

This fall, CDVS will expand its existing online consultations with a new chat service and new online workshops for all members of the Duke community. Since mid-March, CDVS staff have redesigned instructional sessions, constructed new workflows for accessing research data, and built new platforms for accessing data tools virtually. We look forward to connecting with you online and working with you to achieve your research goals.

In addition to our expanded online tools and instruction, we have redesigned our CDVS-Announce data newsletter to provide a monthly update of data news, events, and workshops at Duke. We hope you will consider subscribing.

Upcoming Virtual CDVS Workshops

CDVS continues to offer a full workshops series for the latest strategies and tools for data focused research. Upcoming workshops for early September include:

R for data science: getting started, EDA, data wrangling
Thursday, Sep 1, 2020 10am – 12pm
This workshop is part of the Rfun series. R and the Tidyverse are a data-first coding language that enables reproducible workflows. In this two-part workshop, you’ll learn the fundamentals of R, everything you need to know to quickly get started. You’ll learn how to access and install RStudio, how to wrangle data for analysis, gain a brief introduction to visualization, practice Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), and how to generate reports.
Register: https://duke.libcal.com/event/6867861

Research Data Management 101
Wednesday, Sep 9, 2020 10am – 12pm
This workshop will introduce data management practices for researchers to consider and apply throughout the research lifecycle. Good data management practices pertaining to planning, organization, documentation, storage and backup, sharing, citation, and preservation will be presented using examples that span disciplines. During the workshop, participants will also engage in discussions with their peers on data management concepts as well as learn about how to assess data management tools.
Register: https://duke.libcal.com/event/6874814

R for Data Science: Visualization, Pivot, Join, Regression
Wednesday, Sep 9, 2020 1pm – 3pm
This workshop will introduce data management practices for researchers to consider and apply throughout the research lifecycle. Good data management practices pertaining to planning, organization, documentation, storage and backup, sharing, citation, and preservation will be presented using examples that span disciplines. During the workshop, participants will also engage in discussions with their peers on data management concepts as well as learn about how to assess data management tools.
Register: https://duke.libcal.com/event/6867914

ArcGIS StoryMaps
Thursday, September 10, 2020 1pm – 2:30pm
This workshop will help you get started telling stories with maps on the ArcGIS StoryMaps platform. This easy-to-use web application integrates maps with narrative text, images, and videos to provide a powerful communication tool for any project with a geographic component. We will explore the capabilities of StoryMaps, share best practices for designing effective stories, and guide participants step-by-step through the process of creating their own application.
Register: https://duke.libcal.com/event/6878545

Assignment Tableau: Intro to Tableau work-together
Friday, September 11, 2020 10am – 11:30am
Work together over Zoom on an Intro to Tableau assignment. Tableau Public (available for both Windows and Mac) is incredibly useful free software that allows individuals to quickly and easily explore their data with a wide variety of visual representations, as well as create interactive web-based visualization dashboards. Attendees are expected to watch Intro to Tableau Fall 2019 online first, or have some experience with Tableau. This will be an opportunity to work together on the assignment from the end of that workshop, plus have questions answered live.
Register: https://duke.libcal.com/event/6878629

data science, Data Visualization, finance, machine learning, rstats, Statistics

2020 RStudio Conference Livestream Coming to Duke Libraries

2020-01-13 Joel Herndon, Ph.D. 4 Comments

Interested in attending the 2020 RStudio Conference, but unable to travel to San Francisco? With the generous support of RStudio and the Department of Statistical Science, Duke Libraries will host a livestream of the annual RStudio conference starting on Wednesday, January 29th at 11AM. See the latest in machine learning, data science, data visualization, and R. Registration links and information about sessions follow. Registration is required for the first session and keynote presentations. Please see the links in the agenda that follows.

Wednesday, January 29th

Location: Rubenstein Library 249 – Carpenter Conference Room

11:00 – 12:00	RStudio Welcome – Special Live Opening Interactive Event for Watch Party Groups
12:00 – 1:00	Welcome for Hadley Wickham and Opening Keynote – Open Source Software for Data Science (JJ Allaire)
1:00 – 2:00	Data, visualization, and designing with AI (Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, Google)
2:30 – 4:00	*Education Track (registration is not required)* Meet you where you R – Lauren Chadwick, R Studio. Data Science Education in 2022 (Karl Howe and Greg Wilson, R Studio) Data science education as an economic and public health intervention in East Baltimore (Jeff Leek, Johns Hopkins) Of Teacups, Giraffes, & R Markdown (Desiree Deleon, Emory)

Location: Edge Workshop Room – Bostock 127

5:15 – 6:45	*All About Shiny (registration is not required)* Production-grade Shiny Apps with golem (Colin Fay, ThinkR) Making the Shiny Contest (Duke’s own Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel) Styling Shiny Apps with Sass and Bootstrap 4(Joe Cheng, RStudio) Reproducible Shiny Apps with shinymeta (Carson Stewart, RStudio)
7:00 – 8:30	*Learning and Using R (registration is not required)* Learning and using R: Flipbooks (Evangeline Reynolds, U Denver) Learning R with Humorous Side Projects (Ryan Timpe, Lego Group) Toward a grammar of psychological Experiments (Danielle, Navaro, University of New South Wales) R for Graphical Clinical Trial Reporting(Frank Harrell, Vanderbilt)

Thursday, January 30th

Location: Edge Workshop Room – Bostock 127

12:00 – 1:00	Keynote: Object of type closure is not subsettable (Jenny Bryan, RStudio)
1:23 – 3:00	*Data Visualization Track (registration is not required)* The Glamour of Graphics (William Chase, University of Pennsylvania) 3D ggplots with rayshader (Dr. Tyler Morgan-Wall, Institute for Defense Analyses) Designing Effective Visualizations (Miriah Meyer, University of Utah) Tidyverse 2019-2020 (Hadley Wickham, RStudio)
3:00 – 4:00	Livestream of Rstudio Conference Sessions (registration is not required)
4:00 – 5:30	*Data Visualization Track 2 (registration is not required)* Spruce up your ggplot2 visualizations with formatted text (Claus Wilke, UT Austin) The little package that could: taking visualizations to the next level with the scales package (Dana Seidel, Plenty Unlimited) Extending your ability to extend ggplot2 (Thomas Lin Pedersen, RStudio)
5:45 – 6:30	Career Advice for Data Scientists Panel Discussion (registration is not required)
7:00 – 8:00	Keynote: NSSD Episode 100 (Hillary Parker, Stitchfix and Roger Peng, JHU)

Data Curation, Data Management, data science, Data Sources, Data Visualization, GIS, Open Data, spatial humanities

Introducing Duke Libraries Center for Data and Visualization Sciences

2019-08-05 Joel Herndon, Ph.D. 2 Comments

As data driven research has grown at Duke, Data and Visualization Services receives an increasing number of requests for partnerships, instruction, and consultations. These requests have deepened our relationships with researchers across campus such that we now regularly interact with researchers in all of Duke’s schools, disciplines, and interdepartmental initiatives.

In order to expand the Libraries commitment to partnering with researchers on data driven research at Duke, Duke University Libraries is elevating the Data and Visualization Services department to the Center for Data and Visualization Sciences (CDVS). The change is designed to enable the new Center to:

Expand partnerships for research and teaching
Augment the ability of the department to partner on grant, development, and funding opportunities
Develop new opportunities for research, teaching, and collections – especially in the areas of data science, data visualization, and GIS/mapping research
Recognize the breadth and demand for the Libraries expertise in data driven research support
Enhance the role of CDVS activities within Bostock Libraries’ Edge Research Commons

We believe that the new Center for Data and Visualization Sciences will enable us to partner with an increasingly large and diverse range of data research interests at Duke and beyond through funded projects and co-curricular initiatives at Duke. We look forward to working with you on your next data driven project!

Data Visualization, Uncategorized

Expanding Support for Data Visualization in Duke Libraries

2018-04-23 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Over the last six years, Data and Visualization Services (DVS) has expanded support for data visualization in the Duke community under the expert guidance of Angela Zoss. In this period, Angela developed Duke University Libraries’ visualization program through a combination of thoughtful consultations, training, and events that expanded the community of data visualization practice at Duke while simultaneously increasing the impact of Duke research.

As of May 1st, Duke Libraries is happy to announce that Angela will expand her role in promoting data visualization in the Duke community by transitioning to a new position in the library’s Assessment and User Experience department. In her new role, Angela will support a larger effort in Duke Libraries to increase data-driven decision making. In Data and Visualization Services, Eric Monson will take the lead on research consultation and training for data visualization in the Duke community. Eric, who has been a data visualization analyst with DVS since 2015 and has a long history of supporting data visualization at Duke, will serve as DVS’ primary contact for data visualization.

DVS wishes Angela success in her new position. We look forward to continuing to work with the Duke community to expand data visualization research on campus.

Data Curation, Data Management, data science, Data Visualization, GIS, rstats, spatial humanities, stata, tutorial, workshops

Fall Data and Visualization Workshops

2017-08-21 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Visualize, manage, and map your data in our Fall 2017 Workshop Series. Our workshops are designed for researchers who are new to data driven research as well as those looking to expand skills with new methods and tools. With workshops exploring data visualization, digital mapping, data management, R, and Stata, the series offers a wide range of different data tools and techniques. This fall, we are extending our partnership with the Graduate School and offering several workshops in our data management series for RCR credit (please see course descriptions for further details).

Everyone is welcome at Duke Libraries workshops. We hope to see you this fall!

Workshop Series by Theme

New Data Management Services @ Duke

2017-01-17 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Duke Libraries are happy to announce a new set of research data management services designed to help researchers secure grant funding, increase research impact, and preserve valuable data. Building on the recommendations of the Digital Research Faculty Working Group and the Duke Digital Research Data Services and Support report, Data and Visualization Services have added two new research data management consultants who are available to work with researchers across the university and medical center on a broad range of data management concerns from data creation to data curation.

Interested in learning more about data management?

Join us at the Research Computing Symposium on January 18th to learn more about new services and staff
Attend a workshop on data management:
- Data Management Fundamentals (Feb 6)
- Data Management and Reproducibility (Feb 20)
- Consent, Data Sharing and Data Reuse (Mar 21)
- Data Management Tools: The Dataverse Project (Mar 29)
Ask a question or schedule a consultation at askdata@duke.edu.

Our New Data Management Consultants

Sophia Lafferty-Hess attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she received a Master of Science in Information Science and Master of Public Administration. Prior to coming to Duke, Sophia worked at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at UNC-Chapel Hill within the Data Archive as a Research Data Manager. In this position, Sophia provided consultations to researchers on data management best practices, curated research data to support long-term preservation and reuse, and provided training and instruction on data management policies, strategies, and tools.

While at Odum, Sophia also helped lead the development of a data curation and verification service for journals to help enforce data sharing and replication policies, which included verifying that data meet quality standards for reuse and that the data and code can properly reproduce the analytic results presented in the article. Sophia’s current research interests include the impact of journal data sharing policies on data availability and the development of data curation workflows.

Jen Darragh comes to us from Johns Hopkins University where she served for the past seven years as the Data Services and Sociology Librarian, and Hopkins Population Center Restricted Projects Coordinator. In this position, Jen developed the libraries’ Restricted Data Room and designed the secure data enclave spaces and staff support for the Johns Hopkins Population Center.

Jen received her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology from Westminster College (PA) and her Master of Library and Information Sciences degree from the University of Pittsburgh. She has been involved with socio-behavioral research data throughout her career. Jen is particularly interested in the development of centralized, controlled data access for sensitive human subjects’ data (subject to HIPAA or FERPA requirements) to facilitate broader, yet more secure sharing of existing research data as a means to produce new, cutting-edge research.

Data Curation, Data Management, Uncategorized

Duke Libraries and SSRI welcome Mara Sedlins!

2016-09-08 Joel Herndon, Ph.D. 2 Comments

On behalf of Duke Libraries and the Social Science Research Institute, I am happy to welcome Mara Sedlins to Duke. As the library and SSRI work to develop a rich set of data management, analysis, and archiving strategies for Duke researchers, Mara’s postdoctoral position provides a unique opportunity to work closely with researchers across campus to improve both training and workflows for data curation at Duke. – Joel Herndon, Head of Data and Visualization Services, Duke Libraries

I am excited to join the Data and Visualization Services team this fall as a postdoctoral fellow in data curation for the social sciences (sponsored by CLIR and funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation). For the next two years, I will be working with Duke Libraries and the Social Science Research Institute to develop best practices for managing a variety of research data in the social sciences.

My research background is in social and personality psychology. I received my PhD at the University of Washington, where I worked to develop and validate a new measure of automatic social categorization – to what extent do people, automatically and without conscious awareness, sort faces into socially constructed categories like gender and race? The measure has been used in studies examining beliefs about human genetic variation and the racial labels people assign to multiracial celebrities like President Barack Obama.

While in Seattle, I was also involved in several projects at Microsoft Research assessing computer-supported cooperative work technologies, focusing on people’s preferences for different types of avatar representations, compared to video or audio-only conferencing. I also have experience working with data from a study of risk factors for intimate partner violence, managing a database of donors and volunteers for a historical archive, and organizing thousands of high-resolution images for a large-scale digital comic art restoration project.

I look forward to applying the insights gained from working on a diverse array of data-intensive projects to the problem of developing and promoting best practices for data management throughout the research lifecycle. I am particularly interested in questions such as:

How can researchers write actionable data management plans that improve the quality of their research?
What strategies can be used to organize and document data files during a project so that it’s easy to find and understand them later?
What steps need to be taken so that data can be discovered and re-used effectively by other researchers?

These are just a few of the questions that are central to the rapidly evolving field of data curation for the sciences and beyond.

Data Analysis, Data Sources, Data Visualization, GIS, Uncategorized, workshops

Fall 2016 DVS Workshop Series

2016-08-24 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Data and Visualization Services is happy to announce its Fall 2016 Workshop Series. Learn new ways of enhancing your research with a wide range of data driven research methods, data tools, and data sources.

Can’t attend a session? We record and share most of our workshops online. We are also happy to consult on any of the topics above in person. We look forward to seeing you in the workshops, in the library, or online!

Data Sources

Web Scraping and Gathering Data from Websites (Sep 27)

Data Cleaning and Analysis

OpenRefine: Data/Text Cleaning, Mining and Transformations (Sep 9)

Regular Expressions (Sep 26)

Data Analysis

Introduction to Stata (Two sessions: Sep 21, Oct 18)

Introduction to R: Data Transformations, Analysis, and Data Structures (Sep 13)

Mapping and GIS

Introduction to ArcGIS (Two sessions: Sep 14, Oct 13)

Introduction to QGIS (Sep 29)

ArcGIS Online (Oct 17)