Category Archives: Data Visualization

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

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)

Data Visualization

Data Visualization with Excel (Sep 19)

Designing Academic Figures and Posters (Sep 20)

Making Data Visual (Sep 29)

Advanced Tableau (Data Structures) (Oct 5)

Graphic Design for Conceptual Diagrams (Oct 7)

Adobe Illustrator for Diagrams and Visualizations (Oct 14)

Visualizing Qualitative Data (Oct 19)
Visualizing Basic Survey Data in Tableau – Likert Scales (Nov 10)

Data Visualization

2016 Student Data Visualization Contest Winners

2016-02-02 Angela Zoss 2 Comments

Thanks to an earlier fall deadline, we are already ready to announce the winners of our fourth year of the Duke Student Data Visualization Contest. The 14 visualizations submitted highlighted some very exciting visualization work being done by students of all ages here at Duke. The winners and other submissions to the contest will soon be featured on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

As in the past, the submissions were judged on the basis of five criteria: insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty. The three winning submissions this year exemplify all of these and tell rich stories about three very different types of research projects. The winning submissions will be converted to larger poster versions and hung in the Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services (in the Edge). Be on the look out later this semester for a reception to celebrate their hard work! The winners will also receive Amazon gift cards. We are very grateful to Duke University Libraries for their continuing support of the contest.

First place:

Global Flows of Agriculture and Forestry Feedstocks
Brandon Morrison, Ph.D. Candidate (Division of Earth & Ocean Sciences, NSOE)

Second place:

Feature Interpretations from Ground Penetrating Radar at Vulci, Italy
Katherine McCusker, Ph.D. Student (Art History)

Third place:

Simulated Sediment Deposition at Continental Margins
Candise Henry, Ph.D. Student (Division of Earth & Ocean Sciences, NSOE

Please join us in celebrating the outstanding work of these students!

Data Visualization, event

Duke welcomes artist/illustrator Jennifer McCormick

2015-11-16 Angela Zoss 1 Comment

On the last day of classes, December 4, the Duke community will have a very special treat: a visit from artist and certified medical illustrator Jennifer McCormick. Jennifer has been actively exhibiting and speaking about her work for several years, including a recent TEDx talk at Wake Forest University and an exhibit at the Durham Arts Council.

In Jennifer’s work as a medical illustrator, she partners with attorneys to create visualizations that explain complex injuries and medical procedures to jury members. In her fine art, however, she builds on the histories and x-rays of patients to explore “an opportunity for healing, hope, and acceptance.” Her unique pieces transform the original clinical imagery of the injury into gorgeous, natural, holistic scenes. In her artist talks, she speaks of “the power of intention” and “our forgotten superpowers” to raise awareness of the importance of art and spirituality for healing.

Jennifer will join us for the final Visualization Friday Forum of the semester. It will be an opportunity for visualization enthusiasts, clinicians, medical imaging specialists, legal scholars, and those interested in the intersection between health and art to gather together for a presentation and conversation. The talk will occur in the standard time slot for the Visualization Friday Forum — noon on Friday, December 4 — but the location is changing to accommodate a larger audience. For one week only, we will meet in Duke Hospital Lecture Hall 2003.

The Visualization Friday Forum is sponsored by the Duke University Libraries (Data and Visualization Services), Duke Information Science + Studies (ISS), and the DiVE group. Jennifer’s visit will also be sponsored by the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities & History of Medicine and Duke Law – Academic Technologies.

We are so excited Jennifer has agreed to travel to Duke for a visit. Please mark your calendars for this event. If you would like to speak with Jennifer about medical illustrations or the intersection between medicine and spirituality, please contact Angela Zoss.

Data Visualization

Enter the 2016 Student Data Visualization Contest

2015-10-22 Angela Zoss 1 Comment

Calling all Duke undergrad and grad students! Have you worked on a course or research project that included some kind of visualization? Maybe you made a map for a history class paper. Maybe you invented a new type of chart to summarize the results of your experiment. Maybe you played around with an infographic builder just for fun.

Now is the time to start thinking about submitting those visualizations to the Duke Student Data Visualization Contest. It’s easy — just grab a screenshot or export an image of your visualization, write up a short description explaining how you made it, and submit it using our Sakai project site (search for “2016 DataVis Contest”). The deadline is right after finals this fall, so just block in a little extra time at the end of the semester once you’re done with your final assignments and projects.

Not sure what would work as a good submission? Check out our Flickr gallery with examples from the past two years.

Not sure if you’re eligible? If were a Duke student (that is, enrolled in a degree-granting program, so no post-docs) any time during 2015, and you did the work while you were a student, you’re golden!

Want to know more about the technical details and submission instructions? Check out the full contest instructions.

Data Visualization

Welcoming our new Data Visualization Analyst — Eric Monson

2015-09-01 Angela Zoss

Data and Visualization Services is proud and excited to welcome Eric Monson, Ph.D., our newest staff member. Eric joins the team as our Data Visualization Analyst, working with Angela Zoss to provide support for data visualization across Duke’s campus and community.

Eric worked for several years under the supervision of Rachael Brady, who was the head of the Visualization Technology Group (now the Visualization and Interactive Systems group), the founder of the DiVE, and a hub for the visualization community at Duke. Though transitioning from work in applied physics, Eric quickly became an active member of the broader visualization research community, sharing his experiences developing interactive visualization applications through online forums and professional organizations. His natural design sense contributes to an elegant portfolio of past work, and his work on projects in both the sciences and the humanities gives him an extremely wide range of experience with different datasets, tools, and techniques.

Since DVS began offering visualization services in 2012, Eric has been an active supporter and collaborator. While continuing to work as a Research Scientist, Eric has co-organized the Visualization Friday Forum speaker series, teamed up with Angela on instructional sessions, and been an active supporter of visualization events and initiatives. He is an experienced and patient instructor and will bring many years of consulting experience to bear in this new role.

Over the past three years, demand for visualization support has steadily increased at Duke. With an active workshop series, guest lectures in a variety of courses, individual and small-group consultations, and programming such as the Student Data Visualization Contest, DVS is very happy to be able to boast two staff members with visualization expertise. In the near future, we hope to increase our visualization workshop offerings and continue to identify powerful but easy-to-use tools and techniques that will meet the needs of Duke visualizers. Taking advantage of Eric’s background in sciences and humanities, DVS looks forward to being able to answer a broader range of questions and offer a more diverse set of solutions.

Please join us in welcoming Eric to the team! As always, feel free to contact askdata@duke.edu with any questions or data-driven research needs.

Data Analysis, Data Management, Data Sources, Data Visualization, GIS, rstats, spatial humanities, stata, Statistics, workshops

DVS Fall Workshops

2015-08-11 Joel Herndon, Ph.D.

Data and Visualization Services is happy to announce its Fall 2015 Workshop Series. With a range of workshops covering basic data skills to data visualization, we have a wide range of courses for different interests and skill levels.. New (and redesigned) workshops include:

OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization
Historical GIS
Advanced Excel for Data Projects
Analysis with R
Webscraping and Gathering Data from Websites

Workshop descriptions and registration information are available at:

library.duke.edu/data/news

Workshop	Date
OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization	Sep 9
Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables	Sep 15
Introduction to ArcGIS	Sep 16
Easy Interactive Charts and Maps with Tableau	Sep 18
Introduction to Stata	Sep 22
Historical GIS	Sep 23
Advanced Excel for Data Projects	Sep 28
Easy Interactive Charts and Maps with Tableau	Sep 29
Analysis with R	Sep 30
ArcGIS Online	Oct 1
Web Scraping and Gathering Data from Websites	Oct 2
Advanced Excel for Data Projects	Oct 6
Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables	Oct 7
Introduction to Stata	Oct 14
Introduction to ArcGIS	Oct 15
OpenRefine: Data Mining and Transformations, Text Normalization	Oct 20
Analysis with R	Oct 20

Data Visualization, event

2015 Student Data Visualization Contest Winners

2015-03-19 Angela Zoss

Our third year of the Duke Student Data Visualization Contest has come and gone, and we had another amazing group of submissions this year. The 19 visualizations submitted covered a very broad range of subject matter and visualization styles. Especially notable this year was the increase in use of graphic design software like Illustrator, Photoshop, and Inkscape to customize the design of the submissions. The winners and other submissions to the contest will soon be featured on the Duke Data Visualization Flickr Gallery.

As in the past, the submissions were judged on the basis of five criteria: insightfulness, broad appeal, aesthetics, technical merit, and novelty. The three winning submissions this year exemplify all of these and tell rich stories about three very different types of research projects. The winners will be honored at a public reception on Friday, April 10, from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m, in the Brandaleone Lab for Data and Visualization Services (in the Edge). They will each receive an Amazon gift card, and a poster version of the projects will be displayed in the lab. We are very grateful to Duke University Libraries and the Sanford School of Public Policy for sponsoring this year’s contest.