The sounds of data are all around us: from phone notifications to car horns to the whistle at a sports game. In this two-part workshop, participants will be introduced to the theory and practice of data sonification. We will briefly delve into the history of sonification and think through the unique ways that humans process and communicate sonic information. In the first session, through interactive exercises, like virtual sound walks, participants will be introduced to approaches and theories of listening to sound critically and reflectively.

Date: 12 February 2024 Are you interested in sharing your work and connecting with other academic or non-academic researchers using a free, open platform that combines features of social networking sites and institutional repositories? Join us for this live introduction and demo, where participants will learn how to establish a professional profile, build community, and […]

Date: 12 February Need to create a map, but don’t know how? Have you been asked to analyze geospatial data and you are wondering where to start? This introduction is for you. We will use QGIS to explore the world of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and familiarize ourselves with the different steps of creating a […]

Date: 13 February 2024 This session will serve as a walk-through demonstration of how to use the Data Management Plan (DMP) Assistant tool. A high-level overview of research data management and the role of DMPs will be provided, as well as concrete examples, resources, and best practices in the creation of a data management plan […]

Date: 13 February 2024 This presentation will aim to provide a high-level overview of Canada’s research data management landscape, focusing on sensitive data involving human participants in the context of the Tri-Agency RDM Policy (2021) and Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2022). Various resources and tools at the institutional and […]

Date: 13 February 2024 This session will provide an overview of three nationally-supported Research Data Management (RDM) Platforms and Services, the Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR); Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository; and Lunaris, Canada’s national data discovery service. FRDR is a bilingual publishing platform for sharing and preserving Canadian research data in any discipline. The […]

This beginner level workshop will introduce you to the basic concepts of the world’s most popular Python programming language. You’ll learn to store data in Python data types and variables, as well as learn how to perform operations on numbers and strings. Python IDE Anaconda will be briefly discussed. No prior knowledge of Python is required.

From very small tabular datasets to mid-size mixed methods records to the titan data for Advanced Research Computing, researchers at McMaster have a wide range of needs for storing research data. But what options are available? What are some workflows when you’re working alone vs with a research team? What’s available if you need a bit more? Join us for a session on research data storage and backup. In this workshop, we’ll start with an overview of different storage platforms available to you as a researcher, their features and drawbacks, and outline data backup and security principles. Then, we’ll share information about the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s annual Resource Allocation Competition and how researchers can start working with large-scale computational resources. Note: This webinar will be for researchers who are curious about the Resource Allocation Competition but have not accessed it yet. For those who are already accessing it and would like more information, please see the Intermediate High-Performance Computing session with Sergey Mashchenko.

Date: 14 February 2024 We’ll be presenting the main features of Stylo, a web-accessible semantic text editor for writing in the humanities and social sciences. Since the project’s launch in 2017, one of its objectives has been to provide a tool capable of changing and improving the academic publishing chain, particularly the workflow of journals […]

Date: 14 February 2024 This workshop will introduce the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI): the de facto standard in the humanities for creating digital texts. In this workshop, we will discuss the scholarly and technical affordances are of using the TEI, answering why it is that so many digital humanities resources—including Early English Books Online (EEBO), […]

This workshop will introduce attendees to techniques for scraping information from the web using Python’s Beautiful Soup (bs4) toolkit. We will begin with a basic overview of the “anatomy” or structure of a webpage. Students will then learn how to write a script for extracting textual data from websites like Reddit and organizing it into spreadsheets. The second half of the workshop will explore how to use Python’s Pandas library to clean and analyze your data. In addition to technical skills, students are encouraged to engage with critical questions like: What is web scraping for and what can we, as researchers, learn from publicly available data? What are the potential ethical and legal challenges of data harvesting, and how do we do it responsibly?

Date: 15 February 2024 Using a single environment for all stages of your research project can help you organize your work. To this end, our team recommends JupyterLab, a software that logs code, text, equations, graphs and visualizations in a single document. This tool can also execute the lines of a program one at a […]