Next week, I will have been working for the Australian Research Data Commons for a year. I am having a ball and really enjoying the work/life balance. I also answer to “Kit” there. You can see why here Changing names. Blogjune 10/24
Lots on this week that I thought I would share in a series of posts.
On Monday I flew to Melbourne for ResBaz Vic. We have a stall here and I am chatting with people about what we do and how we can help them. I attended a long R lesson yesterday and, in a session about how the University of Melbourne is improving digital skills in the humanities, found out about their great online tool to help researchers decide which tool/technique to use for different types of data.
On Thursday I will be presenting, with Simon Musgrave from the Language Data Commons of Australia, about Solving 10 research challenges with the ARDC HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons.
I have loved my work days preparing for it. Tim Sherratt has been so generous and thorough in creating the Trove Data Guide. I knew it’s documentation of the quirks and data structures in Trove was useful, but until I tried to prepare a session about how to get the best out of the guide I had not realised just how comprehensive he had been. I particularly like the construction of a set of start to finish self-paced lessons in the last section of the guide, Research Pathways. These are stand-alone and each one steps people through every component, for example from getting a Trove API key to using a Jupyter notebook. This design decision, where people don’t have to jump around from an earlier part of the guide to work out how to do things, makes it easier to recommend it to researchers. I ALSO enjoyed using the Newstalk tool to download 52 comments on a news story about a Quokka eating a cigarette, and being able to call that work.
Here is the synopsis of the session.
Get hands-on with 2 tools from the ARDC HASS and Indigenous Research Data Commons, the Crate-O metadata editor and the Trove Data guide. After 2 forty minute deep dives, learn how other parts of the Research Data Commons help researchers solve another 8 research challenges, in a series of 5-minute lighting tours.
By the end of the session, you will know how to use a tool to package your research data and its metadata together in an RO-Crate and be better equipped to locate and manipulate data from the National Library’s Trove research portal. You will also have new leads for research with Indigenous data; social media data; data about creative arts; and social sciences data.