The Connecticut Digital Scholarship Exchange is a year-long collaborative program hosted by Connecticut College and Trinity College. Designed to create opportunities for faculty to learn about digital scholarship, both institutions will host workshops, tours, and other events to introduce faculty to different digital scholarship tools and approaches and discuss core competencies in project management and sustainability. Workshops this fall include mapping with ArcGIS Online, data cleaning with OpenRefine for data visualization, and text analysis with Voyant Tools.
Funding and training for the CT Digital Scholarship Exchange have been provided by the Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Assistant Director for Digital Scholarship Lyndsay Bratton and her counterpart at Trinity College, Digital Scholarship Coordinator Mary Mahoney, attended the DHRI as a team this past summer, learning how to use Python for text analysis, QGIS for mapping, and other tools commonly used in computational research in the humanities and social sciences.
October CT DS Exchange workshops:
Building Maps with Hands-On Data Visualization (Trinity College)
Friday, October 1 from 1:15-2:30
In this introductory workshop, we’ll learn ways to design and create different types of interactive maps to tell your data story. We will focus on two types of maps—choropleth (colored polygon) maps and story maps—and a newer generation of easy-to-learn tools to build them. Concepts and examples are drawn from a new book by Trinity professor Jack Dougherty and alumnus Ilya Ilyankou, Hands-On Data Visualization, available open-access online (HandsOnDataViz.org) and in print (O’Reilly Media, 2021). See workshop agenda at this short link (case-sensitive): https://bit.ly/2021-10-01. Register here.
Data Visualization I: Explore and Clean Data with OpenRefine (Connecticut College)
Monday, Oct 25th at 1:15pm
This workshop will introduce OpenRefine, a powerful but user-friendly program for exploring and cleaning messy data. With its ability to incorporate textual cleaning techniques such as clustering and faceting, OpenRefine provides an advanced alternative to Excel without needing to understand computer programming. Registrants will be sent instructions for installing OpenRefine prior to the workshop. Register here.
Creating Maps with ArcGIS Online (Trinity College)
Friday, October 29, 11:30-12:45
ArcGIS Online is a powerful cloud-based mapping and analysis platform that can be used to create informative and compelling web and story maps. This workshop will demonstrate the features and functionality available through a free public account, with a focus on free data available through Esri’s Living Atlas data repository. During this workshop participants will create a public account, or optionally use an organizational account through their institution, and learn how to create web maps focused on socioeconomic and demographic data, including historic redlining districts for major cities in the US. Register here.