Data Mindfulness training integrated in new resources

Posted on September 13, 2021 by Robin Rice

The Research Data Service is pleased to announce an update to our ‘Data Mindfulness: Making the Most of Your Dissertation Data’ training materials.

Originally developed to provide face to face research data management (RDM) training for undergraduate students undertaking a dissertation project, the newly revised course is now available as one of ten units within the Library’s new LibSmart II training course.

‘Data Mindfulness: Your Dissertation Data‘ combines videos, reading material, and short interactive exercises to help students think about data management issues as they prepare to undertake a research project, potentially for the first time.

The course is designed to follow the research journey from beginning to end, from developing a research question and conducting a literature search, through to generating and managing project data and files during the life of the project and beyond.

The ‘Data Mindfulness’ unit provides an approachable introduction to the subject of RDM, with up-to-date and relevant information and guidance for undergraduate and masters students. The updated content also includes expanded material on finding and accessing secondary data sources, as well as links to wider training and resources provided by the Library.

You can find more information about the new LibSmart II course, and how to enrol here: https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/help-consultancy/rm-and-consultancy/academic-support-librarians/libsmart.

In addition to LibSmart II, we are also pleased to be working in conjunction with the Research Training Centre, based in the School of Social and Political Science, to deliver an updated version of the ‘Data Mindfulness’ course as part of the Micro-Methods Workshop series. You can find details of the Micro-Methods Workshops series here: https://research-training-centre.sps.ed.ac.uk/micro-methods.

Finally, we have made the ‘Data Mindfulness’ training materials available for re-use under an open CC-BY license, and you can find links to the videos and download a PDF of the revised ‘Data Mindfulness’ course handbook from the Research Data Service site (a Word version of the handbook is available on request): https://www.ed.ac.uk/information-services/research-support/research-data-service/training.

We hope these ‘Data Mindfulness’ materials are useful and relevant and appreciate any comments or feedback that you may have at data-support@ed.ac.uk.

Bob Sanders
Research Data Support Assistant

New home for Edinburgh Research Data Blog!

Posted on July 28, 2021 by Robin Rice

Tempus fugit. This Data Blog, which has been going since 2013 is now moving to Edinburgh University Libraryblogs. This follows the 2018 organisational merger of the Data Library team at EDINA with Research Data Support in Library & University Collections.

We hope you will actively subscribe to the new blog at https://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/datablog/ now, by entering your email address in the right navigation panel so you don’t miss any future posts!

Meanwhile we will redirect the old URL and all the older posts to the new site so you won’t have to remember where to go to catch all the news about the Research Data Service and research data management at University of Edinburgh. Any cited posts or bookmarks will continue to resolve.

Otherwise it just remains to thank our former and future hosts – EDINA, and the Digital Library – for providing the platform.

Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head of Research Data Support
Library and University Collections

Future of University of Edinburgh trusted research environments

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Robin Rice

For the past few years, Information Services (ISG) have been providing a University Data Safe Haven (DSH) service, to host analysis of sensitive research data. Alongside this, Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) have been delivering national services such as the Scottish National Safe Haven, run on behalf of Public Health Scotland.

EPCC is a key partner in the Data Driven Innovation programme (DDI), and is funded through the Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal to deliver the Edinburgh International Data Facility. This will provide similar trusted research environments, such as the DataLoch.

The purpose for which the University DSH service was constructed is now converging with the services which EPCC will be providing as part of the EIDF. ISG and EPCC are now working together to rationalise how these services are provided into the future.

The EIDF and ISG DSH teams will now begin looking at detailed plans for supporting current and future users and the University DSH will stop accepting further projects for on-boarding from 18 June, 2021. Timeframes for research project migrations, where necessary, will be decided on a case by case basis in consultation with principal investigators. We will be contacting all current University DSH project owners to discuss their service provision, and we will similarly contact project owners who were investigating using the University DSH.

For further information contact Robin Rice, Research Data Service Owner (r.rice@ed.ac.uk), Information Services or Rob Baxter, Director of Data Services, EPCC (r.baxter@epcc.ed.ac.uk).

Dealing with Data 2019 (January 2020): Collaboration Across the Nations

Posted on June 2, 2020 by Robin Rice

Picture the scene: A cold January day, the wind blowing the scarves of the passers-by through the large windows of the Informatics Forum meeting room. The group inside listens, takes notes, tweets, and asks questions of the speakers, representing a range of disciplines across the University…

Dealing with Data is an annual event hosted by the Research Data Service. Its aim is to engage the University community of researchers and support professionals around a theme, to share success stories and challenges in the myriad, everyday issues involved with data-driven research. The theme this year reflected the difficulty of managing research data in large, collaborative projects. Due to industrial action, the original November event was postponed to January. Around a hundred researchers – staff and students – participated, along with support staff who gave lightning talks about research-focused services. Full presentations and videos are now available.

So Benjamin Bach, our keynote speaker, inspired us with state of the art data visualisation software and techniques for both exploration and presentation. But he also illustrated the difficulties of portraying all of the data in all of its facets of a rich dataset, and the consequences of making necessary choices for its interpretation.
The first session began with Tamar Israeli’s study of researchers’ use of collaborative and institutional tools showed the challenges of making local infrastructure user friendly enough to attract new users familiar with slick cloud-based services. Then Mark Lawson demonstrated his ingenuous ‘ethical hacking’ to piece together a set of APIs to create a research workflow for samples and images for histology research. Minhong Wang conveyed a higher level view of data management focused not just on data-driven, but knowledge-driven phenotyping.

Next were the lively lightning talks, in which Mike Wallis of Research Services warned of a new Digital Dark Age, and David Creighton-Offord spoke of the dillemmas in Information Security user support where shiny doesn’t always equal safe. Lisa Otty spoke of innovative training and text mining projects bringing data science to the Humanities, and Rory MacNeil demonstrated how the RSpace electronic lab notebook can connect to a host of popular open science tools.

Following a lively lunch with chat between delegates and with hosts of the service exhibitions, Alex Hutchison showed a highly programmatic view of data management and ethics control from the UNICEF collaboration, in collecting and analysing real world data about children in need. Caileen Gallagher offered a case study of how food courier data could be used to empower workers. Sanja Badanjak shared her data integration problems of peace agreements around the world, conveying both innovative solutions and time-consuming workarounds.

In the final session Edward Wallace brought in the Edinburgh Carpentries to the rescue of poor data skills within Biological Sciences and the wider University – itself a great example of cross-community collaboration building a community of trainers. Gillian Raab showed us how any data problem however intractable can be solved by resourcefulness and determination, making use of DataShield for multi-party computation when datasets are too sensitive to be shared. Johnny Hay and Tomasz Zielinski demo’d their Plasmo ‘boutique repository’ for plant-systems biology modelling and Holly Tibble described tackling an international collaboration in linking administrative datasets via ‘ridiculously detailed’ statistical analysis plans. Representing the Research Data Service, I wrapped up proceedings with some of these very observations.
Both presentations and videos are available.

Welcome

Jeremy Upton, Director of Library and University Collections. [Presentation]

Keynote

Data Visualization for Exploration and Presentation, Prof. Benjamin Bach. Lecturer in Design Informatics and Visualization. [Presentation] [Slides]

Session 1 – Chair: Theo Andrew

“Data Something”: Assessing Tools, Services and Barriers for Research Data Collaboration at the University of Edinburgh – a small-scale study carried out by Dr Tamar Israeli with support from the Research Data Support team. Robin Rice – Data Librarian & Head of Research Data Support Services. [Presentation] [Slides]
Integrated secure web application to deliver centralised management of research samples, histology services and imaging data. Mark Lawson, Data & Project Manager, MRC Centre for Reproductive Health, QMRI. [Presentation] [Slides]
Building the Knowledge Graph for UK Health Data Science Minhong Wang et. al, Deanery of Molecular, Genetic and Population Health Sciences. [Presentation] [Slides]

Session 2 – Chair: Kerry Miller

The Data Opportunities & Challenges when Collaborating across Organisations
Alex Hutchison, Delivery Director – Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF. [Presentation] [Slides]
Restoring Gig Workers to Power: Personal Data Portability, Supply of Digital Content and Free Flow of Data in the European Data Economy. Cailean Gallagher, Scottish Trades Union Congress, & St Andrews University Institute of Intellectual History. [Presentation] [Slides]
Dealing with data in peace and conflict research. Sanja Badanjak, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Law. [Presentation] [Slides]

Session 3 – Chair: Robin Rice

Bringing researchers to data: computing skills training with Edinburgh Carpentries.
Edward Wallace, Sir Henry Dale Fellow, Institute of Cell Biology. [Presentation] [Slides]
Running an analysis of combined data when the individual records cannot be combined. Gillian M Raab and Chris Dibben, Scottish centre for Administrative Data Research. [Presentation] [Slides]
The grant is dead, long live the data. Johnny Hay and Tomasz Zieliński, School of Biology, University of Edinburgh. [Presentation] [Slides]
International collaborations using linked administrative data: Lessons from the MARIC study. Holly Tibble, Usher Institute, University of Edinburgh. [Presentation] [Slides]

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Robin Rice
Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support
Library & University Collections