Upcoming classes: Community Data Science Workshop, R + Stata

Several upcoming workshops and classes will be held Spring Quarter at the University of Washington, focusing on students needing R or Stata introductions, as well as another round of the popular Community Data Science Workshops. Details are below.

Classes

The Center for Social Science Computation and Research has posted their Spring Quarter classes, which includes Introduction to Stata, Introduction to R with R Studio, and Introduction to R with Commander. Students will learn basics software organization, where to find help, and how to get started with basic analyses. No previous experience in statistical programming is necessary, but basic understanding of statistics will be helpful. 

Workshops

The Spring 2016 round of the Community Data Science Workshops are for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, free and open source software, Twitter, civic media, etc. The Spring 2016 series consists of one Friday evening and three Saturday sessions in April and May. The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and, thanks to sponsorship from eScience and the Department of Communication, are free of charge and open to anyone.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like:

- Are new contributors to an article in Wikipedia sticking around   longer or contributing more than people who joined last year?

- Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag?

- Are people who participated in a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people that joined the project outside of the event?

Details and dates are online here:

http://wiki.communitydata.cc/CDSW_Spring_2016

If you are interested in participating, please fill out our registration at the link above before Saturday April 2. Register soon!

If you already know how to program in Python, it would be really awesome if you would volunteer as a mentor! Being a mentor involves working with participants and talking them through the challenges they encounter in programming. No special preparation is required. If you’re interested, there’s a link on the page above, or you can send me an email. If you mentored before, it’s still easier if you fill our form again. Thanks!

Regards,

Mako (On behalf of Jonathan, Tommy, Dharma, Ben, Mika, and all the CDSW

mentors.)

Next Week! Digital Scholarship Focus Groups

In an effort to develop our digital scholarship program in the Libraries, we will be holding a series of focus groups with faculty and graduate students working in the sciences. Goals of the focus groups are to determine what types of digital scholarship research and teaching is currently being done in departments across campus and to determine what types of barriers (if any) exist in completing digital scholarship work. If you are working on digital projects or data visualization, we would love to hear from you! Faculty focus groups are March 29: 12:30-1:15pm, March 30: 10:30-11:15am. Graduate student focus groups are March 29: 10:30-11:15am, March 29: 2:30-3:15pm. You may sign up for focus groups here. We'll confirm your participation, send you the location and a list of a few questions we'll cover to help start the conversation.  Light refreshments will be provided for participants.

Thank you for your participation! Questions can be directed to Verletta Kern, our Digital Scholarship Librarian.

STEM Journal Publishing: What’s an Editor to Do?

Join the UW Libraries for a panel discussion from four UW faculty members who are also journal editors. Geared toward graduate students, post-docs and librarians, the panelists will address a variety of issues of interest to current and future authors, as well as librarians. Possible questions for discussion include:

 What do you do as an editor?
 How did you become one?
 Where do you fit in the hierarchy of your journal?
 What does it take to get published in your field today?
 What is the impact of the increase in manuscripts being submitted today?
 How is peer review handled with your journal?
 Have you run into ethical issues, and, if so, how did you deal with them?
 What are some of the most common mistakes made by authors?
 What advice would you give an author preparing to submit her/his first paper?
 How is digital accessibility attained?
 How to manage traditional papers augmented with other content such as video or audio content?

Our panelists include:
Valerie Daggett: Professor, Bioengineering
Jody Deming: Professor, Oceanography and Professor, Astrobiology
Richard Ladner: Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Randy Leveque: Professor, Applied Mathematics

Session moderator:
Kelly Edwards: Associate Dean for Student and Postdoctoral Affairs, Graduate
School, and Associate Professor, Department of Bioethics and Humanities,
School of Medicine

Tuesday, April 12, 4:00-5:00PM; Reception, 5:00-5:30PM
Research Commons, Presentation Place, Allen Library South