Today we’ll focus on open data as part of our series on International Open Access Week. What is open data? SPARC defines open data as “research data that is freely available on the internet permitting any user to download, copy, analyze, re-process, pass to software or use for any purpose without financial, legal, or technological…
International Open Access Week: New Guidelines for Federal Grants
Welcome to International Open Access Week 2022! To promote Open Access at Connecticut College, we are publishing one new post a day this week. The Open Access movement continues to grow. (Wait, back up! What is open access?) In addition to increased visibility and access, openness promotes research integrity, allows for wider and interdisciplinary collaboration,…
Moodle Upgrade!
Information Services has upgraded Moodle to a newer version (3.11 for those who are keeping track). While you’ll find that most things look the same, there are a few changes that we think are worth noting. We have added a couple of new course formats to choose from, to change the visual appearance of your…
High Impact Assignment Idea: Editing Wikipedia
We haven’t posted about Wikipedia assignments in several years (5?!), but we’ve had a lot of questions and interest recently. So when I saw this in my inbox yesterday from Helaine Blumenthal at Wiki Education, I needed share it with you. If you are interested in Wikipedia assignments, read her message below and sign up!…
Faculty Recipient of CT State OER Grant Publishes Asian Art & Architecture Image Database
In April 2021 Chu-Niblack Assistant Professor of Art History and Architectural Studies Di Luo was awarded a State of Connecticut Open Educational Resources (OER) Impact Grant for her proposal to publish a publicly-accessible image database in collaboration with her students across several courses in Asian art. Upon its launch in December 2021, Asian Art &…
New Public Database Makes our Campus Art Collections Available for Broader Use
The Digital Scholarship & Curriculum Center recently published the Campus Art Collections on a platform from LUNA Imaging, making these collections available in a beautiful and user-friendly format. The database will bring together all the different art collections at the College, some of which are part of the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections &…
Introduction to Web Scraping Tools
Building off our recent exploration of tools for scraping and analyzing Twitter data, and expanding into more general web scrapers, there are a range of tools that allow you to “scrape” or extract data from any website you want. Before you begin scraping, make sure that your target website allows it. You can do this…
New Google Appointment Schedule
The appointment lot feature of Google Calendar has always been one of our favorite tools, and its use was particularly important over the past few semesters. We are excited to share that Google has rolled out a brand new version of appointment slots called “Appointment Schedules”. If you are an avid appointment slot user, you…
Teaching in the Zooniverse: Student Participation in Research Projects
One unintended outcome of participating in Douglass Day 2022 this February, was learning to use the Zooniverse platform to transcribe historical documents (read about our involvement in The Day). After the event, I spent some time exploring the projects hosted on Zooniverse and am excited to share some initial thoughts about how you and your…
Twitter Data Collection and Analysis Tools
Post contributed by Owen Avery ‘25, Digital Scholarship Assistant Almost 500 million tweets are sent per day, and thanks to Twitter’s fairly generous API (a tool that allows users to look at Twitter data without having to go on the page itself), there are loads of tools available to collect large datasets of tweets using…