The eResearch team, just finished running a two day session on mapping tools for the humanities, delivered by visiting trainers from the University of Melbourne eResearch team, under the Research Bazaar #resbaz umbrella. Resbaz is about enabling communities of practice for eResearch, rather than building expensive centralized support. We had lots of positive feedback from participants, and a good vibe; you know it’s working when people sit at the computers and keep playing well after the lunch has arrived.

The session served-up two main packages:

• CartoDB – a nice online tool for map building – putting (fancy) dots on online maps. See the slides. CartoDB is available as a paid service, but stay tuned for a version that’s free for researchers.edu.au.
• Tilemill, a more comprehensive tool for making publication quality print and online maps (available as a desktop app).

More workshops coming soon – see these offerings from Intersect, our eResearch partner. The Open Refine course in particular is really useful for anyone who deals with spreadsheet or table data.

• 5 August 2014 Cleaning & exploring your data with Open Refine at UWS.
• 5 August 2014: Data Visualisation with Google Fusion Tables at UWS.

We don’t have all the results in from the official feedback survey yet, but the verbal feedback was positive from the participants. One thing we’d like to look at for future #resbaz training is making sure we add a little dash of data management and consideration of the end-to-end research process to each workshop.

• Depending on the course, take the time at the start to set people up with Cloudstor+ storage, a git repository or another appropriate management system for working data and a place to publish results, maybe github, maybe figshare, or a discipline specific or institutional repository.
• Keep online notes, maybe using one of the online lab/research notebook platforms – (we’re watching Egon Willighagen’s ongoing review of these systems attentively – please keep it up Egon!).
• At the end of the workshop, publish something – in the case of the maps it would be good to actually work though the process of getting a good print or web version of the map, and making sure all the data and code used to create it are saved and published.
• Oh, and I’d love to be able to offer a prize for the first published map in an article or submitted thesis to come out of the workshop.

First Research Bazaar event at UWS, Mapping for humanities by Peter Sefton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.