Going Public: Connecting Research & Community

Are you interested in involving community in your research process but uncertain where to start?  Do you already involve members of the public in your research process and would you like to connect with like-minded people around your experience?

Join us on Saturday, April 7^th from 9am-1pm for “Going Public: Connecting Research & Community” where we’ll explore engaging community in the research process through public scholarship, citizen science, community-engaged research, and participatory research. This interdisciplinary event offers an opportunity to expand your skills through several workshop offerings, to hear from researchers and community participants on their experiences through our “Research & Community Connections” panel presentation, and to see the different shapes this research can take through our graduate student poster display. For full details about our event including the schedule, please see the “Going Public: Connecting Research & Community” website.

This event is free and open to all: faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and community members from outside the university.  To ensure your space in our event, please register in advance. Registration will remain open until filled.

Announcing the 2016 eScience Data Science for Social Good summer program

The University of Washington eScience Institute, in collaboration with Urban@UW and Microsoft, is excited to announce the 2016 Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) summer program. The program brings together data and domain scientists to work on focused, collaborative projects that are designed to impact public policy for social benefit.

Modeled after similar programs at the University of Chicago and Georgia Tech, with elements from our own Data Science Incubator, sixteen DSSG Student Fellows will be selected to work with academic researchers, data scientists, and public stakeholder groups on data-intensive research projects. Graduate students and advanced undergraduates are eligible for these paid positions.

This year’s projects will focus on Urban Science, aiming to understand and extract valuable, actionable information out of data from urban environments across topic areas including public health, sustainable urban planning, crime prevention, education, transportation, and social justice.

For more program details and application information visit:

http://escience.washington.edu/get-involved/incubator-programs/data-science-for-social-good/

DRUW Gets Going

As mentioned in our previous blog post we are developing an institutional data repository here at UW. We are joining the Hydra community and building our digital repository using the Hydra framework, which pulls together various components and platforms, including Blacklight, Solr and Fedora. More about the technologies in a later post! This project is a partnership between the Libraries and UWIT, the data will live on UWIT’s lolo filesystem.

How did we get here? A few years ago, the Data Services team conducted a survey 323 campus researchers, found that a strong need on our campus was for a place where researchers could store their data for the long term. This, coupled with funder mandates for providing public access to data meant that providing a data repository service at UW just made sense. Luckily, the Libraries administration agreed with us!

Since getting the go-ahead on the project, the majority of our time has been spent on (other than sorting technologies - to be discussed later) ensuring that we make a system that people are going to want to use and that meets their needs. The best way to do this, of course, is to figure out what those wants and needs might be. For this, we used a couple of approaches. First, we had two different standing library committees, the Data Services Committee and the Metadata Interest Group, create user stories. User stories are a technique from agile software development for defining system requirements from the perspective of the people who will use the system. There are different ways to write them, we chose to create each of ours from the skeleton sentence: “(a user type) wants to (their want) so that (why they want it)”. An example user story that was generated from this exercise: “A data depositor wants to not have to contact a librarian to upload a dataset, so that depositing can be done when they want to.” This particular story lead to a desired system feature for self-deposit of datasets. Our most common user types were “Data depositor,” “Researcher” and “Librarian.”

While these were being developed focus groups were held, which brought together researchers from across campus to discuss what they would want out of a data repository. Specifically, the questions asked of the focus groups were intended to identify potential barriers to use, so that we can be aware of those from the beginning and do our best to minimize or eliminate them. These conversations were summarized and then further distilled into the user story format. In total, 71 unique system features were identified. We are currently working on prioritizing the different features, determining what features we have the capability to include now, and what we can perhaps work towards in a future development phase of the repository project.

UW Libraries Forms Team to Develop Data Repository

The University of Washington Libraries is excited to announce the formation of a team to develop a Data Repository. The Data Repository at UW (DRUW, pronounced droo) will provide a secure, long-term location for UW faculty to store and share their research datasets. This repository will support UW researchers in meeting federal and private funder data management mandates and will promote the principles of open access and data sharing, while providing a convenient place to archive and discover datasets from research done at UW.

DRUW builds upon the Libraries existing Data Services offerings, which include assistance with data management plans, locating and acquiring research data, data curation and archiving, and data reference assistance. It also joins our ResearchWorks Services, which has been providing curation and archiving of digital research outputs for more than a decade. DRUW will allow campus researchers to archive their research data in a secure, reliable digital repository and allow users from off-campus to discover their work.

Data Repository Librarian Mahria Lebow has recently joined the Data Services Unit at the UW Libraries, and carries project management responsibilities for the repository. Updates and information about the project will be available here on the Data Services Blog.

For more information, contact Mahria Lebow, mahria at uw dot edu.

Research Data Management Workshops: Lessons Learned

From January 22 to March 5, 2014, three University of Washington librarians offered a seven-week course in research data management. As a complement to the two workshops we offered in 2013, which were geared toward research data management basics for librarians, this series was aimed at graduate students, primarily in the School of Forest and Environmental Sciences, Biology, Engineering, the iSchool and Health Sciences.

We ran the course as a pilot of the New England Collaborative Data Management Curriculum. Jenny Muilenburg, Mahria Lebow and Joanne Rich worked together to offer the class, which was designed as a one-hour meeting with lecture and exercises, meeting once a week for seven weeks. Students were asked to register, but the classes were not required, and no credit was given. Each of the weeks touched on one concept from the NECDMC curriculum, with one change made mid-course that combined two concepts into one lecture. We took each lecture module from NECDMC and modified it to suit our personal and institutional preferences, as well as adding UW-specific information. One primary lecture room was used on the main campus, where we both recorded the lecture and streamed it to a second location in Health Sciences, where Joanne Rich facilitated the streamed lecture and ran the exercises off-air.

Each class consisted of about 30 minutes of lecture, and 30 minutes of exercise and discussion. Module topics included types, stages and formats of data; metadata; storage, backup and security; legal and ethical considerations; sharing and reuse; and archiving and preservation. Experts from on campus were asked to contribute opinions and UW-specific information, specifically on metadata, storage and security, and legal and ethical information. Overall class evaluations after each lecture were positive, with good feedback about what to include in future iterations of the class.

It was a great first foray into RDM curriculum for non-librarians, although attendance with attrition was not as good as we'd hoped. Our next move will be to take this experience and the curriculum, modify and shorten, and present it to subject-specific librarian groups on campus. I'd like to see one for STEM disciplines and the social sciences, and the health science librarians are working on one for their disciplines. More information will be forthcoming as we pull together what we've learned and where we'll go from here.

UW Collaborating on $37M Data Science Initiative

Big news for the University of Washington: UW, along with NYU and Berkeley, has been given 5-year, $37.8M award from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to advance the growth of data-intensive discovery across a broad range of fields. It's a huge, cross-institutional and multi-disciplinary effort that will build and explore new data science challenges and environments.

The UW team includes more than a dozen faculty, and is led by Ed Lazowska, Director of the UW eScience Institute. Berkeley's team is led by Saul Perlmutter and NYW's by Yann LeCun.

Fernando Perez from Berkeley has written a good description of his hopes for the project, what he thinks it means and what he thinks it might help solve (hint: it involves more than just data science).