Second Monday Research Data Brownbags are sponsored by Research Data Services and the School of Library and Information Studies. If you would like to speak or suggest a topic, please contact Dorothea Salo.

Unless otherwise noted, all brownbags take place in the SLIS Commons (fourth floor of Helen C. White Hall) at noon, usually the second Monday of each month. Pizza and soda provided! RSVP via this web form so that we can estimate our pizza order and send reminder emails shortly before each event.

Remote participation is possible through Adobe Connect; URLs are provided below.

Previous brownbags

September 12, 2011: NSF Data Management Plans

Research Data Services will facilitate a discussion of the NSF’s new guidelines for grant applicants. Written an NSF grant and gotten DMP feedback? About to write one, and have questions or concerns? Have a wishlist for campus support of data management and DMPs? We want to hear from you!

October 10: Kevin Eliceiri, Image Informatics for Multidimensional Biological Microscopy

Dr. Eliceiri and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation (http://loci.wisc.edu/) are developing a complete, open source system for handling biomedical images, including image acquisition, data storage, metadata (experimental data associated with an image), visualization, analysis, annotation, and database interconnectivity.

November 14: Puneet Kishor, Building a data-sharing database: PaleoDB

Noted open-data practitioner Puneet Kishor of the Department of Geology will demo the Paleobiology Database (http://paleodb.org/), an open, crowdsourced online database of fossils. Questions about technical infrastructure, sustainability, and data sharing welcome!

December 12: Brian Yandell, Statistics support for UW-Madison research

Statistics department chair Brian Yandell will speak about how his department’s strategic plan emphasizes improving statistical literacy and access to statistics support and assistance for UW-Madison researchers.

FEBRUARY 13, 2012: What should grad students know about data management?
(Event recording)

IMPORTANT: This brownbag will take place in the SLIS LIBRARY CLASSROOM, 4191F Helen C. White. Go into the SLIS Laboratory Library and turn left.

This summer Dorothea Salo will inaugurate a one-credit bootcamp-style course on research-data management (LIS 341) for graduate students across the disciplines. What context, best practices, and technologies should be covered? PIs, PAs, RAs, postdocs, dissertators: come prepared with horror stories, experiences good and bad, and your own “if only I’d known that early on” wishlists!

MARCH 12, 2012: GIS Data Preservation, with Jaime Stoltenberg and AJ Wortley
(Adobe Connect archive)

Learn how the Robinson Map Library and the State Cartographer’s Office are archiving geospatial data for use in research and teaching. Preservation of “at risk” and temporally significant digital geospatial content poses challenges:

• Geospatial data layers containing information about land parcels, roads, and administrative boundaries change often.
• Existing copies of these data are often at risk of being overwritten when updates or changes are made, and these superseded snapshots of data are then lost for future use and analysis.

APRIL 9, 2012: Teacher Incentive Fund, Sara Kraemer and Lexy Spry
(Adobe Connect archive)

The Teacher Incentive Fund is a data-driven project that takes advantage of knowledge-management and online-collaboration tools. Also discussed will be how school districts involved in the project use data to inform incentive and compensation decisions.

MAY 7, 2012: Long-Term Ecological Research Network, with Corinna Gries
(Adobe Connect archive)

LTER is an NSF-funded network of 26 sites throughout the US, Antarctica and French Polynesia. LTER has had the mandate to archive data and employ a dedicated Information Manager since its inception 30 years ago. The group of LTER Information Managers was instrumental in developing procedures and approaches for long-term ecological data storage, including the Ecological Metadata Language, employed for data discovery and data access. New challenges include:

• streaming sensor data management
• a centralized network information system, and
• implementation of workflow systems for quality control measures.

May 7 bonus: posters from LIS 855 “Digital Curation” service-learning projects centered on local datasets.