What basic computing skills would be useful to me as an interdisciplinary researcher? This workshop will preview some of the skills needed to incorporate data-driven practices into research, including:

• Spreadsheets
• Tidy data
• OpenRefine
• R

It will be an example-driven tutorial on basic computing skills, co-hosted by the Library’s Scholarly Commons and Research Data Service. Short tutorials alternate with hands-on practical exercises, and participants are encouraged both to help one another, and to try applying what they have learned to their own research problems during and between sessions. Participants should bring their own laptops to work on.

Everyone is welcome; no experience necessary!

Install in advance:
R Studio
OpenRefine

Instructor Bios:

• Elizabeth Wickes is a Data Curation specialist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library where she provides data deposit consultation services, data management training, and other data manipulation consultations. She holds a Master of Science in Library and Information Science and enjoys teaching scholar scholars how to code and manage their data.
• Eleanor Dickson is the Visiting HathiTrust Research Center Digital Humanities Specialist in the Main Library. She facilitates training and outreach for the HathiTrust Research Center, a collaborative project to enable large-scale text analysis of the HathiTrust Digital Library. Additionally, she supports digital humanities scholarship at Illinois through consultations and workshops in the library’s Scholarly Commons.
• Andrea Thomer is a graduate student in the Graduate School of Information Sciences. Her research in information science is hugely influenced by my prior work as an excavator of ice age fossils at the Page Museum at the La Brea Tar Pits. Her interests include biodiversity and natural history museum informatics; long-term data and database curation, particularly in a research or museum setting; and bridging gaps between biology, geology, and informatics.