Digital Scholarship Workshop Series debuts at the Libraries

Technology has changed how scholarship is conducted and disseminated. Researchers are broadening the impact of their research with new digital tools and practices. The NCSU Libraries is excited to announce a new Digital Scholarship Workshop Series throughout the spring 2018 semester, aimed at faculty and students interested in applying digital tools to their research methodologies. 

No prior experience is required for these free workshops. Whether you are a scientist interested in learning scholarly metrics for measuring your research impact or a humanities scholar excited about starting a digital humanities project, this workshop series will support an open environment for faculty and students from across disciplines to learn entry-level to intermediate-level digital tools and methods for creating, sharing, and evaluating new forms of scholarship. 

Hosted at the NCSU Libraries, the Digital Scholarship Workshop Series offers sessions on topics as broad as building a scholarly identity, measuring your research impact, creating a scholarly website, building digital exhibits, and 360° video creation. Each workshop will provide a brief overview of topics and tool demonstrations with an open Q&A. Instructors will also highlight resources in the Libraries for building upon the skills you’ve learned and how to schedule follow-up consultations.  

The Libraries will be offering more workshops throughout the semester, so please keep an eye out for new ones being added to the series. For more information, visit the NCSU Libraries Digital Scholarship Workshop Series page to register: http://go.ncsu.edu/digital-scholarship

The spring 2018 Digital Scholarship Workshop Series includes:

“Harvesting Data from Twitter”
Friday, Jan. 19, 1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
This is an informal learning session (rather than a formal workshop) where we will learn how to harvest Twitter data using Twarc, a command line tool. You'll learn the basics of working with the command line and should have a file of tweets to explore by the end of the workshop. There will be quite a bit of time after the learning portion for experimentation.

“Understand and Build Your Scholarly Identity”
Friday, Feb. 2, 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
It is increasingly necessary for researchers to have a professional presence online. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to establish and manage your scholarly identity to help you connect with colleagues, find collaborators, and expose your research to new audiences. You’ll also learn how to boost your scholarly impact using social media and alternative metrics that come with these new methods of knowledge communication and online dissemination.

“Measuring Your Research Impact”
Friday, Feb. 9, 10:00 a.m.-11:30 a.m.
As scholarly outputs continue to evolve and more scientific grant proposals require broader impact statements, it is important to gather evidence of how your research will have a greater impact upon society. This workshop will provide an introduction to broader impacts and how traditional and nontraditional scholarly metrics, such as Journal Impact Factor, h-index, Eigenfactor Score, and Altmetrics, are being used to measure research impact.

“Creating a Scholarly Website”
Friday, Feb. 23, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Have you ever wanted your own professional website but don’t know where to start? In this workshop, you will create a free website for professional use, with options for blogging, hosting syllabi, resumes or portfolios. You will learn three tools, including Jekyll, a static website generator, Markdown, for easily updating content, and Github Pages for freely hosting the site. At the end of the workshop, you should have your site up and running and know how to edit it for future use.

“Storytelling with GIS Maps”
Friday, Feb. 23, 1:00 p.m.-2:30 p.m.
In this workshop, you will learn how to create a story map using a combination of interactive ArcGIS Online base maps, images and text. Using Esri’s cloud-based story mapping GIS platform, you will learn how to design a web-based map with sample geographic data, text and images. Together, we will take a look at several example story map application templates and build an interactive linear online map that tells your own geographic story.

“Introduction to XML and Digital Scholarly Editing using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI)”
Friday, March 9, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
This introductory workshop on text encoding in XML will teach you the structure of XML and the principles of text encoding with the Text Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines. The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines makes it possible to create and publish digital scholarly editions by defining a standard XML vocabulary. In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of structuring a TEI document, how to record bibliographic metadata, and how to start creating transcriptions of manuscripts and other primary sources for digital humanities projects. No prior experience with XML or TEI is expected.

“360° Videos Made Easy”
Friday, March 9, 1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Have you ever wanted to create 360° videos? In this workshop, you will learn how to engage, explore, and tell stories with immersive imagery using 360° videos. This introductory workshop will teach you how to storyboard videos, operate a Ricoh Theta 360° camera, and go over the workflow of planning, capturing, and editing 360° video, adding 360° metadata to published videos, and how to upload the video to YouTube for 360° viewing.

“Getting Started with Building Digital Exhibits”
Friday, March 16, 1:00 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Omeka is an open source web application used by archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts to create attractive, customizable web exhibits and databases. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll learn how to set up a free version of Omeka from Omeka.net to create your own digital archive of images and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and how to begin building a digital exhibit.

“Creating Compelling Infographics for Your Research”
Wednesday, March 21, 10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Infographics can be powerful tools for communicating research and achieving greater impact. Yet, while a good infographic clarifies and captivates, a bad infographic distorts and distracts. This workshop will cover basic design and narrative principles for creating infographics that balance visual appeal with data integrity. We will discuss multiple resources for generating infographics. Participants will gain hands-on experience creating an infographic with free infographic creation tools.

“Tracking Online Research Engagement with Altmetrics and R”
Friday, April 6, 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Altmetrics tracks how often journal articles with a unique identifier (doi, arxiv id, isbn, etc.) are being discussed, shared, downloaded, or saved on social media platforms, news outlets, policy documents, and online reference managers.  Using R, a statistical computing language, this workshop will teach participants how to retrieve and process data from the Altmetrics.com API to visualize and compare online research engagement across multiple scholarly publications. This workshop is geared toward intermediate-level R users, as the basics of R will not be covered. While not required, you may be interested in attending the following related workshops: "Understand and Build Your Scholarly Identity" and "Measuring Your Research Impact."