Free 'Data Carpentry' Workshops Hosted by University of Baltimore
November 19, 2021
Contact: Office of Advancement and External Relations
Phone: 410.837.5739
The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, along with the Applied Information Technology and Information Systems and Decision Science departments at the University of Baltimore, will host a free series of "Data Carpentry" workshops for interested UBalt students, alumni, faculty and staff. If space is available, these workshops will be open to other community members.
- What: Data Carpentry Workshops (Online/Virtual via Zoom)
- When: Six Sessions on Tuesday through Thursday, Jan. 11-13, and Jan. 18-20, 2022
- Time: 5-8:30 p.m. each session (20 hours total)
- Who: Maximum of 20 participants. Anyone interested in learning about data science techniques for social good
- Prerequisites: None. Learners may have little to no prior computational experience. The instructors place a priority on creating a friendly environment to empower researchers and enable data-driven discovery. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to teach not only how to do analyses, but how to manage the process to make it as automated and reproducible as possible.
You must commit to attending all 20 hours to sign up for these workshops. Don't take a spot and not show up. Space is limited and it will likely fill quickly. All workshops are free to attend. If spaces are open for the greater community, it will be publicized via UBalt's channels.
To sign up, go here.
This opportunity is made possible because the University of Baltimore is part of the 2021 DataUp Cohort. DataUp is a program of the South Big Data Hub that enables researchers and educators better understand and address how to prepare institutions for teaching data science in order to prepare students for future data-intensive and data-enabled environments.
About the Data Carpentry Workshops:
To augment the curriculum for students at UBalt, the workshops will focus on the following:
Data Carpentry (Ecology): This workshop uses a tabular ecology dataset from the Portal Project Teaching Database and teaches data cleaning, management, analysis, and visualization. There are no prerequisites, and the materials assume no prior knowledge about the tools. We use a single dataset throughout the workshop to model the data management and analysis workflow that a researcher would use.
Data Carpentry (Geospatial - Introduction to Geospatial Concepts): The goal of this lesson is to provide an introduction to core geospatial data concepts. It is intended for learners who have no prior experience working with geospatial data and covers the following topics:
- Introduction to raster and vector data format and attributes
- Examples of data types commonly stored in raster vs vector format
- Overview of commonly used programs and applications for working with geospatial data
"The Carpentries is a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives," says Seema Iyer, co-director of the Jacob France Institute and the Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance and research associate professor for the University's Merrick School of Business. "They teach skills that are immediately useful for researchers, using lessons and datasets that allow researchers to quickly apply what they have learned to their own work. I am really excited about using the Data Carpentry curriculum here to help our students become more efficient in their research."
Questions? Feel free to reach out to any of these UBalt faculty leads:
- Seema Iyer, Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance/Real Estate and Economic Development, at siyer@ubalt.edu
- Giovanni Vincenti, Applied Information Technology, at gvincenti@ubalt.edu
- Anil Aggarwal, Information Systems and Decision Science, at aaggarwal@ubalt.edu.