Note: This is an archive of past workshops.
The purpose of these workshops is to introduce students, faculty, and staff members at Vanderbilt University to new tools and techniques in the field of scholarly communications and digital scholarship. All are welcome! No need to RSVP. If you have questions, please contact [email protected].
- Lindsey Fox
A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a suite of mapping software and technology that is used to create, store, change, analyze, and display geographically referenced data. The first portion of this workshop will explore the basics of GIS including: types of data, analysis, and terminology. The second portion of this workshop will show you how to create a basic map using ArcGIS online.
- Cliff Anderson
Wikipedia is the premier reference source of our era. But who writes its articles? How does the editorial process work? In this session, we'll teach you everything you need to know to become a productive editor of Wikipedia. Learn how to create an account, add to existing articles, comment and pose questions on talk pages, and even create your own articles. We'll also suggest how to incorporate Wikipedia into your pedagogy and scholarship.
- Ed Warga
Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles with full reuse rights. This workshop will explore the different options available to authors for releasing their work as Open Access. We will discuss the definition of Open Access, the value and benefits it holds for authors and readers, strategies for retaining copyright in a work, options for publishing in Open Access journals, and the use of Open Access repositories.
- Suellen Stringer-Hye
Networks are everywhere these days - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter are all networks of one form or another. In this session, we'll teach you how to analyze networks using the open source graph database Neo4J. We will show you how to set up a sample social network, analyze the relations between its members, and visualize the results using a simple query language called Cypher. You'll leave with the ability to analyze simple networks and with the tools you'll need to develop more complex projects.
- Morgan Daniels
The datasets underlying research findings are increasingly acknowledged as valuable scholarly products. Through data publication, researchers can give more visibility to their work while making data available to others for reuse. This workshop will address data publication from the researcher's perspective, including benefits to researchers and best practices for sharing datasets. Participants will learn how to submit a dataset to Figshare, a versatile online tool for data publication.
- Cliff Anderson & Ramona Romero
Among other things, GitHub is a social network for computer programmers. But GitHub is also a fantastic educational technology. In this session, we'll introduce you to git, the distributed version control system that powers GitHub. We'll show you how to set up an account with GitHub and collaborate with others on projects. You will learn the basics of Markdown, the simple markup language used to communicate on GitHub. We'll talk about the uses of GitHub in the classroom, the sciences, and the digital humanities. If you're brave, we'll even get into advance topics like branching and forking. By the end of the session, you'll be ready to create repositories and collaborate with scholars around the interwebs.
- Pam Morgan
ICPSR (The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) is among the largest social science data archives in the world. This session will show you how to leverage ICPSR’s various tools to help you pinpoint data sets relevant to your research. You will also learn how to decipher results. Learn more about how this immense data repository can help you advance your research.
- Chris Benda
Keeping track of references while doing research, and deploying those references in papers, books, and other texts, became much easier with the advent of bibliographic management systems like EndNote and RefWorks. Zotero, one of the more recent entrants in the field, is an open source program that works in the Firefox browser or as a standalone application. This workshop will introduce Zotero and give participants a chance to start using it to build a library of references.
- Cliff Anderson
XML stands for the eXtensible Markup Language. At root, XML is a set of rules for creating markup languages to describe different domains. Almost anything can be marked up and made readable by computers using XML–from historical documents to financial records. We'll learn the basic rules for creating well-formed XML documents and also how to validate them against XML schemas. We'll also learn how to use XPath expressions to explore our documents in novel ways. By the end of the session, you'll be ready to start an XML-based project of your own.