Tag Archives: data management

Data Management, data science, Data Visualization, workshops

CDVS Data Workshops: Spring 2022

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!

Data Curation, Data Management

Love Your Data Week (Feb. 13-17)

In cooperation with the Triangle Research Library Network, Duke Libraries will be participating in Love Your Data Week on February 13-17, 2017. Love Your Data Week is an international event to help researchers take better care of their data. The campaign focuses on raising awareness and building community around data management, sharing, preservation, and reuse.

The theme for Love Your Data Week 2017 is data quality, with a related message for each day.

  • Monday: Defining Data Quality
  • Tuesday: Documenting, Describing, and Defining
  • Wednesday: Good Data Examples
  • Thursday: Finding the Right Data
  • Friday: Rescuing Unloved Data

Throughout the week, Data and Visualization Services will be contributing to the conversation on Twitter (@duke_data). We will also host the following local programming related to the daily themes:

In honor of Love Your Data Week chocolates will be provided at these workshops!

The new Research Data Management staff at the Duke Libraries are available to help researchers care for their data through consultations, support services, and instruction.  We can assist with writing data management plans that comply with funder policies, advise on data management best practices, and facilitate the ingest of data into repositories. To learn more about general data management best practices, see our newly updated RDM guide. 

Contact us at askdata@duke.edu to find out how we can help you love your data! 

Get involved in Love Your Data Week by following the conversation at #LYD17, #loveyourdata, and #trlndata.

All promotional Love Your Data 2017 materials used under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Citation: Bass, M., Neeser, A., Atwood, T., and Coates, H. (2017). Love Your Data Week Promotional Materials. [image files]. Retrieved from https://osf.io/r8tht/files/

Data Curation, Data Management

New Data Management Services @ Duke

Data ManagementDuke 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?

Our New Data Management Consultants

sophialh2Sophia 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.

jen2Jen 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!

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  

2016-08-25 11.06.17 HDRI 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.