Welcome back to campus! With the start of another academic year comes new (and returning) opportunities to explore tools and skills that can enhance your research process–whether related to workflows in your research group, pursuing new methods of analysis, or improving the organization of your files. Experts in these topics from various groups on campus are teaching both one-time courses as well as series of workshops throughout the fall semester to help students, faculty, and staff enhance their data management and computational skills.
Each semester, the Social Science Computing Cooperative offers workshops and training sessions in tools commonly used in social science research. Throughout the month of September, there will be trainings focused on R and Stata, including two series of training sessions on Data Wrangling in R and Stata that will be held throughout September and into October. For more information about dates, times, and workshop descriptions, see their entire calendar for the fall semester here.
A workshop series on R programming will be held at Steenbock Library starting on September 6; they will be held on Fridays from 10 a.m. until noon throughout the fall semester. These workshops will cover R basics, data wrangling, data visualization, using R with text data, creating reports, the basics of version control, version control for collaboration, Unix Shell basics, and using R in the Shell. Each workshop should be registered for separately, and the content will build on itself. Registration is required for these workshops, and waitlists are available for fully registered workshops.
The Data Science Hub is hosting Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry workshops this fall, and these workshops will be on each Wednesday starting on September 11 and ending on October 9. The workshops will be held in the BioCommons at Steenbock Library. Data Carpentry workshops will be held in the mornings, and Software Carpentry workshops in the afternoon. These workshops are aimed at graduate students with little to no programming experience, offering them introductions to computational approaches to working with research data and creating reproducible research practices. The tools taught at these workshops include Openrefine, SQL, R, Python, Unix Shell, and Git. Registration is required, and waitlists are available if the workshops fill up. Register for Data Carpentry here and Software Carpentry here.
Each semester, the UW-Madison Libraries hosts workshops on a variety of topics, in addition to the workshop series in R that is included above. There will be three workshops on citation management softwares: on September 24, there will be an Introduction to EndNote, as well as Managing Your Citations with EndNote Basic on October 15, and Introduction to Zotero on October 23. Leveling Up Your Research Data Management Skills, on October 24, will introduce research data management best practices to attendees. These workshops are free to attend, but some may require registration to attend, and they are held in various locations across campus.