Greetings, all,

I hope everyone is staying safe! The Digital Scholarship Group at Boston College is pleased to announce our Spring 2021 workshop series. All events will be held via Zoom, and please register to receive a link. All events are free and open to the public. We hope to see you there!

All the best,

Sarah

Introduction to Text Analysis
February 11, 2021, 11–12:00 pm.
Text analysis involves the use of digital tools and one’s own analytical skills to explore texts, be they literary works, historical documents, or tweets, and is used in a wide variety of disciplines that typically fall within the humanities and social sciences. This workshop will introduce participants to basic text analysis concepts, how to find and/or create a corpus, and the tools Voyant and Lexos. Example texts will be provided and will be humanities oriented. You are welcome to bring your own text as well. A more advanced text analysis workshop, Text Analysis in JSTOR, will be offered on Feb. 24, 2-3:30 pm.

Introduction to Tiling and Hosting High Resolution Maps and Images
February 16, 2021, 1–2:30 pm.
High-res maps and other images are becoming more and more accessible online, yet in order to take full advantage of their resolution in tools such as KnightLab Storymapping or ArcGIS Online it is necessary to create tiles from these images. A tiled web map is a map displayed in a browser by seamlessly joining dozens of individually requested image or vector data files over the Internet. It is the most popular way to display and navigate maps. This workshop will discuss a variety of open source ways to tile maps and images as well as how to host these tiles on Github to be used in other tools.

Data/Statistics Sources on U.S. Elections
February 17, 2021, 2–3:30 pm.
This workshop will introduce data sources on a few major election data categories. Specifically, the workshop will cover the topic of election returns (on multiple levels), voter registration and turnout, campaign and campaign finance, major political opinion sources, and geospatial file resources for legislative districts.

Go Beyond Simple Charts in Tableau
February 22, 2021, 1-2:30 pm.
While Tableau is one of the most popular data visualization tools with over 24 different types of charts available, it’s not just designed for creating traditional graphs and charts. In this workshop, we will explore some advanced graphs that go beyond the basic data visualization options in Tableau. This workshop assumes that you possess some basic knowledge about using Tableau, such as data connection and chart formation. (In case you don’t, we recommend referring to these workshop materials first.)

Text Analysis in JSTOR
February 24, 2021, 2–3:30 pm.
The demand for text data analysis is growing exponentially. By using JSTOR & Portico’s Text & Data Mining (TDM) platform, users will have access to an online platform that they can learn text analytics, build datasets from across multiple content sources, and visualize and analyze their datasets.

Introduction to ARKit
March 2, 2021, 1-2:30 pm
Alternate Reality (AR) and other immersive technologies are slowly becoming more accessible to the academic community through tools that allow for the creation of experiences without the need to code. In this workshop, Apple’s free tool RealityComposer is introduced. RealityComposer allows users to create and share basic AR experiences with their own or freely available 3D models. This workshop will show users how to import 3D models into the tool on their iPhone or iPad, give the models basic behaviors in an AR environment, and then share them with others.

Reproducibility and Reuse of Code
March 8, 2021, 10-11:30 am
Software has become a crucial component of the research life cycle. Researchers develop algorithms, software simulations and analysis in different programming languages and in different versions.  Access to code and algorithms are critical in solving the reproducibility crisis, advancing research discoveries and speeding up the pace of innovation.

These algorithms, software simulations and analysis are not currently curated and preserved in an executable format in the publishing ecosystem. This makes it difficult for others in the research community to reliably evaluate during peer review and while conducting their own research.

The speaker will discuss why curating software so it can run is important for researchers. He will also demonstrate a new executable code repository, Code Ocean, that allows researchers not only to deposit their code but all other dependencies in order for their software to run. Using container technologies, code execution is agnostic to programming languages, versions or operating systems.

Introduction to Out-of-the-Box Data Visualization Tools
March 9, 2021, 1-2:30 pm
Data visualization tools and technologies are essential to analyze and visualize data. Out-of-the-box data visualization tools offer several advantages over data visualization software: they’re easy to use, free, easy to access, and visualizations can be shared more easily. In this workshop, we will explore some easy to understand online digital tools for visualizing data and learn how to use them to create simple visualizations. Tools that will be covered in the workshop includes Google Spreadsheets and Google Data Studio.

What Is an API? Using Google Sheets to Load Data through the REST API
March 10, 2021, 2-3:30 pm
The application programming interface (API) is a tool used to share content and data between software applications. Many scholarly publishers, databases, and products offer APIs to allow users with programming skills to efficiently extract data to serve a variety of research purposes. In this workshop, we will introduce the basics of API and use OpenFEC API (Federal Election Commission) as an example to demonstrate how to load data to Google Sheets.

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