Monthly Archives: June 2014

Mapping for Humanities Researchers

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Do you have data that needs to be displayed on a map?

The eResearch team at the University of Western Sydney and its partner, Intersect, are flying in experts from Melbourne University to run a series of workshops designed for postgraduate students and academics.

This event will be a series of short workshops on how to turn cultural and communications research into physical and interactive maps using CartoDB and TileMill.

What will I learn?

Participants will learn all the skills to make a beautiful map; from making their data geospatially compliant through to using a cartography formatting language to tell a story with the map.

Each participant will walk away with the ability to produce beautiful visual maps for their research papers, for their presentations, and even publishing interactive maps on their own website.

Who should come?

The first three workshops will be aimed at postgraduate students and academics (we estimate about up to 20 people). NB: We welcome anyone from NSW: industry, other Universities and anyone interested in learning more about these mapping tools. The final workshop is aimed at technical support people and trainers.

When and how will these workshops happen?

There will be four workshop sessions (3 hours each) plus an optional session to teach participants how to format their data so it can be wrangled into a map and then stylised to highlight the map with various cartography techniques, so as to help ‘tell the story’ of the research and its data.

About the Trainers

Steve Bennett has extensive experience providing tools and training to researchers in both government and academia. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne’s ITS Research Services team, he led data management projects at VeRSI (now V3 Alliance), working with researchers from a wide range of disciplines. An open data enthusiast, Steve has contributed extensively to projects such as Open Street Map and Wikipedia and he is the driving force behind Melbourne’s DataHack meetup group. He has run mapping workshops for The University of Melbourne and Deakin University and his mapping projects have featured on the ABC and The Age. Steve believes that everyone needs maps.

Fiona Tweedie was until recently a research and policy officer for the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, before joining the University of Melbourne’s ITS Research Services group. As a research community manager for the humanities and social sciences, she is helping to build communities of researchers around tools including Tilemill and CartoDB. With a PhD in Roman history, she knows first hand the need for researchers to produce maps for themselves, and has created her own maps showing patterns of Roman colonisation. She is also an ambassador for the Open Knowledge Foundation, leading the organisation of the Victorian branch of GovHack 2014, a nationwide open data hackfest taking place in July.

When

Monday 21 July Workshops 1 & 2

Tuesday 22 July Workshops 3 & 4

Where

All workshops will be held at UWS’s Parramatta South Campus. Building EB, Level 3, Room 36

Workshop details

Workshop 1: Monday 21 July, 9.30am-12.30pm
CartoDB (visualisation of data on a map, useful to many researchers)

Workshop 2: Monday 21 July, 1.30pm-4.30pm
Introduction to TileMill (basic cartography)

Workshop 3: Tuesday 22 July, 9.30am-12.30pm
Advanced TileMill (working with data to create a complete custom basemap)

Workshop 4: Tuesday 22 July, 1.30pm-4.30pm
Building TileMill servers and technical briefings.

Cost

Free for attendees

RSVP

Friday 11 July to: http://bit.ly/1nIYnD7

Alveo Launch

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Over the last eighteen months the Alveo (formerly Human Communication Science Virtual Laboratory) team have been building a virtual laboratory for Human Communications Science. The lab is being launched Tuesday 1 July 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm by Professor Mary O’Kane, NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, and Professor Scott Holmes, DVC R&D, University of Western Sydney.

There are also two training/development events:

  • Monday 30 June: Alveo HackFest, for developers, programmers and testers (9:30 am – 6:00 pm)

  • Tuesday 1 July: The first Alveo Users Workshop, for researchers and end-users (9:30 am – 4:00 pm)

What’s Alveo?

Alveo provides on-line infrastructure for accessing human communication data sets (speech, texts, music, video, etc.) and for using specialised tools for searching, analysing and annotating that data.

  • Data Discovery Interface: Browse and search collections, view documents and create lists of items for further analysis. The Data Discovery Interface provides the jumping-off point for further analysis using the Galaxy Workflow Engine, the NeCTAR Research Cloud, the R statistical package or any other preferred tool or platform. A fully featured API underpins the Data Discovery Interface, providing opportunities to extend the functionality of the Virtual Laboratory.
  • Galaxy Workflow Engine: Initially targeted at genomics researchers, Galaxy is a scientific workflow system which is largely domain agnostic. The Galaxy Workflow Engine provides Alveo users with a user-friendly interface to run a range of text, audio and video analysis tools. Workflows defining a sequence of steps in an analysis can be created and then shared with other researchers.

Who should attend?

The two days of events will be of interest to researchers working in Human Communications Science; speech technology, computer science, language technology, behavioural science, linguistics, music science, phonetics, phonology, sonics, and acoustics or related fields, as well as computer scientists and eResearch staff who support them.

Which day to attend?

The second day Tuesday July 1st will be a gentle introduction to the lab, and would be suitable for any researcher who wants to learn about a new approach to research, involving:

  • Finding data from the data collections already in the lab, and running it through the existing lab tools for textual and audio analysis

  • Running repeatable workflows on data both from the lab and elsewhere, via the Galaxy workflow engine

The first day, June 30th will be a hands-on hackfest experience, where we will assist participants in forming teams to explore the potential of the lab. The aim is to team-up programmers and other techies with researchers to introduce them to the potential of the lab:

  • Tackle some traceable problems, such as generating a word-cloud from a large defined set to learn the lab’s interface (API)

  • Explore the process of importing new stand-alone tools into the lab

  • Get some advice or make a start on a research project that might use one of the data

  • Talk to the vLab team about importing new datasets (corpora)

Staff from UWS eResearch and Intersect Australia will be on hand to assist researchers and tech staff in interacting with the lab. If you are an adventurous researcher please consider attending, even if you don’t have the tech skills to deal with scripting, and APIs, and so on we will team you up with people who do, and who can help you approach your research problems.

Professor Denis Burnham The MARCS Institute Director, Alveo Project Director, cordially invites you to the:

Launch and Reception for Alveo, the multi-institutional virtual laboratory for Human Communication Science

Formal launch Professor Mary O’Kane, NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, and Professor Scott Holmes, DVC R&D, University of Western Sydney

Tuesday 1 July 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Followed by drinks

Venue Female Orphan School (Building EZ) University of Western Sydney, Parramatta South campus

RSVP Wednesday 11 June 2014 Dr Dominique Estival, Alveo Project Manager (02) 9772 6596 or d.estival@uws.edu.au

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Join the Research Bazaar

This event is part of the #ResBaz movement. Born out of the University of Melbourne, the Research Bazaar is a campaign to empower researchers in the use of the University’s core IT services:

  • Empowering researchers to collaborate with one another through the use of research apps on cloud services

  • Empowering researchers to share the data with trusted partners via data services

  • Empowering researchers to establish their reputation through parallel computing and supercomputing services

  • Empowering researchers to invent new ways of experimenting through emerging technology services

Visit the Research Bazaar tumblr to learn more about the #ResBaz mission and conference in 2015.

eResearch for UWS Future Research Leaders

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Here are some notes for a presentation by members of the eResearch team to the University of Western Sydney Future Research Leaders Program session on Thursday June 6 th 2014.

With only a ten minute slot in which to present, we decided to keep the presentation at a very high level, and what better way to that by tying it to the eResearch ‘vision statement’.

Support the objectives of the UWS research plan by creating an eResearch Ready UWS , where information and communications technologies support the collaborative conduct of high-impact, high-integrity research with minimal geographical and organisational constraints. eResearch will assist in the transition to a research culture where IT and communications technologies are integral to all research, from the fundamental underpinnings of data acquisition and creation, management and archiving, to analytical and methodological processes. Our aim is to work with stakeholders within and beyond the university to ensure UWS researchers have the information and communications technology resources, infrastructure, support and skills required, wherever they are on the path to an eResearch ready UWS.

The eResearch vision has three clauses. Lets go through them one by one.

Q. Why are we here? A. Impact & Integrity

1. Support the objectives of the UWS research plan by creating an eResearch Ready UWS , where information and communications technologies support the collaborative conduct of high-impact , high-integrity research with minimal geographical and organisational constraints.

Research Integrity

UWS website says:

The University aims to encourage and ensure integrity in research and scholarship as both an intrinsic value and to meet its obligation to research funding bodies, governments and the public as set out in the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007) and the international Singapore Statement on Research Integrity .

Advisors…

In order to provide researchers (both staff and students) with support and resources to achieve this outcome, the University has appointed Research Ethics and Integrity Advisors. Research Ethics and Integrity Advisors are experienced researchers with a good knowledge and understanding of accepted practices in research who actively promote UWS’s commitment to the responsible conduct of research.

… and you can talk to the eResearch team about data management and planning the ‘e’ part of your research , to maximize the integrity of your research.

Research Impact

The library has a page on measuring research impact . See also Alt Metrics as new ways of measuring impact.

But:

… impact is not simply metrics … Impact should be a direct focus of our Research Plan (RP) and in framing the research agenda. Impact case studies will be a mainstream activity among our research communities and we aim to be a sector benchmark in this regard…

Scott Holmes, DVC R&D

Research Impact: new ways of working

Doing eResearch will help with impact via publishing and reuse of data and enabling new modes of research that increase its reach and effectiveness, for example the UWS-led $3M Alveo project .

Q. Why are we here? A. Training and organizational development

2. eResearch will assist in the transition to a research culture where IT and communications technologies are integral to all research, from the fundamental underpinnings of data acquisition and creation, management and archiving, to analytical and methodological processes.

We’re building capability by grass-roots training and engagement

UWS eResearch is trying-out the Research Bazaar approach created by David Flanders and Steve Manos at Melbourne uni . The Melbourne approach is to enlist HDR workers to up-skill research groups from the inside out.

Q. Why are we here? A. To help set the agenda for our IT department

3. Our aim is to work with stakeholders within and beyond the university to ensure UWS researchers have the information and communications technology resources, infrastructure, support and skills required, wherever they are on the path to an eResearch ready UWS.

We work with ITS, and our eResearch partner Intersect to make sure that the right services are on offer.

Number one take-away from today! To get help or advice

Go to MyIT: http://MyIT.uws.edu.au

Click on:

Then click on:

And scroll down to eResearch. Or email eresearch@uws.edu.au

Creative Commons License
eResearch for UWS Future Research Leaders by Peter Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.