Library Main – Data Dispatch

Love Data Week 2018

NYU Libraries — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 15:37:20 +0000

Love Data Week (formerly Love Your Data Week) has arrived! This year’s theme is telling stories with data, and in that spirit Data Services will be hosting a series of workshops designed to think about how you can transform your data, code, and research into effective publications. We’ll look at how you can build an online profile that will allow you to persistently link your publications and data to your researcher identity, and look at ways to ensure you get credit for citations of your research. We’ll cover “executable papers” such as those created in Jupyter Notebooks and R Markdown that enable you to dynamically combine code with research findings, and look at ways to quickly move those papers to the web. We’ll also feature a “Love is in the Air!” day-long mapping event on Wednesday. Look for us on Twitter @nyudataservices to follow along with tips and tools, and right here on the Data Dispatch for more telling stories with data posts. See the schedule below for details and links to sign up.

Events at Bobst Library

Tuesday 13: Storytelling with Code & Data, room 743
3-4:30pm: Tools for Storytelling with Data | Register Here
4:30-6pm: Data Journalism with Meredith Broussard, Assist. Prof, NYU Journalism | Register Here

Wednesday 14: Love is in the Air – Let’s Map It! room 743 & 745
Register Here
9-10am: Evolution of GIS and Mapping
10:15-10:45am: Esri GIS Server
10:45-12pm: Spatial Analytics with ‘Insight’
1:15-4pm: GIS in the Field
4-5:30pm: Python for Spatial Analytics

Friday 16: Data Publishing Basics, room 743
3-4pm: Building a Citation Presence | Register Here
4-5pm: Documenting Your Data | Register Here
5-6pm: Data Publishing Platforms | Register Here

Invitation to Data Services Research Day @ NYU

NYU Libraries — Wed, 18 Oct 2017 15:30:30 +0000

Wednesday, November 8th, 2017, 12-5 pm

We would like to cordially invite you to the Data Services Research Day celebration at NYU.

NYU Data Services is hosting a very exciting Data Services Research Day 2017 @ NYU event – an “All Things Research” information fair on Wednesday, November 8th from 12 to 5pm on 5th floor of Bobst Library.

We aim to build and foster the research community by bringing awareness about research technology; featuring cutting edge tools, services, & resources offered by Data Services and various partners from NYU IT and NYU Libraries; and showcasing some exciting applied research being done here at NYU. Registration for attending and for participating in the competition is now open.

HathiTrust Research Center Text Mining and Analysis Workshop

NYU Libraries — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 12:56:28 +0000

Bobst Library Room 743
Monday, October 16th, 2017
Registration: http://nyu.libcal.com/event/3569768

This workshop will introduce attendees to the HathiTrust Research Center’s tools and services for utilizing the massive HathiTrust Digital Library in computational text analysis. The HTRC leverages the scope and scale of HathiTrust Digital Library’s holdings to allow researchers the opportunity to perform text data mining. The workshop will be broken into two sessions, morning and afternoon. Topics that will be covered include:

How the HTRC makes HathiTrust volumes available for text mining.
How to identify relevant volumes and build worksets (collections) of content for analysis.
How to use HTRC off-the-shelf tools for text analysis and visualization.
How to access HathiTrust data and metadata via provided APIs, request procedures, and open datasets.

The workshop will be led by Eleanor Dickson, ‎HathiTrust Research Center Digital Humanities Specialist at the University of Illinois, and Leanne Nay, Digital Engagement Librarian at the University of Indiana.

Registration is required for the workshop: http://nyu.libcal.com/event/3569768

There will be a follow up individual consultations session on Tuesday, October 17th, 9:00 am for participants in the workshop who need further guidance on a specific HTRC project that they are engaged with.

For those who are currently conducting research using text-as-data and data-mining projects using HathiTrust’s holdings, we will be hosting a lightning-talk session over the workshop lunch hour break on Monday, 12-2 pm. If you are interested in presenting a brief, 5-minute overview of your HTRC-based research, please indicate this on the registration form. The workshop will try to accommodate as many presenters as possible given time restraints.

Please contact digital.scholarship@nyu.edu with any questions.

Data Services Adds Aerial Laser and Photogrammetry Data for Dublin, Ireland

NYU Libraries — Wed, 12 Jul 2017 18:30:44 +0000

NYU Data Services is excited to publish a collection of 2015 Aerial Laser and Photogrammetry Survey Data for Dublin City, Ireland in the Spatial Data Repository. This high density dataset was collected in March 2015 by Debra F. Laefer and a team of researchers at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). The dataset includes aerial laser scanning (ALS) from 41 flight paths in the form of a 3D point-cloud (LAZ) and 3D full waveform ALS (LAS and Pulsewave), and other imagery data. For more information on this collection, please read the official press release. TechCrunch refers to this set as the “largest LiDAR dataset ever to help urban development.”

Also, refer to the video below for a 3D preview of what the data looks like when visualized.

About the Collection and Data Release

The 2015 LiDAR dataset is a landmark acquisition for geospatial data collections at NYU Libraries. It is the first time since the launch of our new Spatial Data Repository in 2016 that the GIS team has worked with researchers at NYU to bring a complex, multi-format original dataset into our collection. Many thanks to Stephen Balogh, Brittney ONeill, Ahn-Vu Vo, and others who put in incredible amounts of work on organizing the data for release and developing capacity for it.

Because of the size and complexity of the data, we had to take several new steps in order to present the data with enough spatial context to be useful to a range of geospatial researchers. One of the most frequent questions we anticipate about this data is, “what is it, and what can you do with it?” To help, the team has provided a 3D rendering of what the point cloud data looks like when visualized (see below).

This is just one section of point cloud data, which anyone can download and visualize with a library like Potree, though even this visualization is presenting a compressed and down-sampled version of the full waveform LiDAR, which is made available in LAS and Pulsewaves formats. Professor Laefer’s team has provided very robust documentation about the use of this data in research, and its application for urban informatics scholarship. To date, this type of data has been used to explore the detection of road curbs and obstacles, tree growth, and more.

The size and complexity of the data associated with the 2015 aerial laser scan has also required us to revise some of the ways that we have been presenting spatial data. In total, the data associated with just a two square kilometer area in Dublin is well over one terabyte and comes in at least four different formats, including point cloud, full waveform, and infrared GeoTIFF. We needed efficient ways for users to explore smaller subsets of the data and download files efficiently, so we expanded the interface of GeoBlacklight to afford for discovery according to individual flight paths or area of coverage.

A screenshot of the navigation interface for the collection. Users can click on individual tiles or lines (which represent discrete flight paths) in order to download the datasets associated with that area or flight.

Through our spatial discovery application, GeoBlacklight, users can find sections or subsets of the data that are important to them and download accordingly. We hope that this release of LiDAR data benefits the larger geospatial community, and we encourage you to explore the complete collection within NYU’s Spatial Data Repository.

Data Services Adds Georeferenced Soviet Maps

NYU Libraries — Tue, 24 Jan 2017 20:22:03 +0000

The results of a crowd-sourced georectification project within Data Services have come to fruition as the NYU Spatial Data Repository has now released its rectified collection of topographic maps of Saudia Arabia and nearby regions. Produced by the Soviet military in 1978 at a 1:100,000 scale, the maps were compiled through a combination of aerial intelligence and on-the-ground observation. These maps are part of an endeavor, unknown in its extent at the time, that has been described as one of the “most comprehensive global topographic mapping project ever undertaken.”¹ Among their striking features are the close detail available on each sheet.

The cities of Dhahran and Al Khobar in Saudia Arabia

Data Services team members and friends gathered for two sessions over the last few months to georectify the maps in the open-source GIS software QGIS. Using bounding coordinate information listed on the maps, 441 map tiles were rectified and reprojected so that they could be displayed and used in GIS software alongside other raster and vector layers in standard WGS 84 (i.e. the World Geodetic System 1984, the standard spatial reference system).

Although human settlement features can be found in detail throughout the collection, they also describe a range of environmental features with hundreds of distinguished land and land-use types from categories of agriculture to forest, grass, soil types, and even five types of sand. Coastal areas can be compared to current coastlines to measure erosion and sea-level changes. Not conversant in Russian? An in-depth technical manual prepared by the U.S. Army in English, and available with the collection, will be your guide. To view the collection with spatial preview, click here.

¹ Alexander J. Kent and John M. Davies, “Hot Geospatial Intelligence from a Cold War: The Soviet Military Mapping of Towns and Cities.” Cartography and Geographic Information Science 40:3 (2013): 248.

Recap: GIS Day 2016

NYU Libraries — Tue, 06 Dec 2016 01:58:08 +0000

Data Services Augmented Reality Sandbox. Users can render instantaneous 3D toposcapes by shifting sand.

November 16 was GIS Day and for the fifth year running, Data Services brought together mapping enthusiasts from across the NYU campus to talk about the latest developments in spatial research. GIS Day is an international celebration of geospatial technology and data and is part of National Geographic Awareness Week. This year, GIS Day @ NYU featured the return of the interactive Augmented Reality Sandbox exhibit and the highly anticipated Mapping Competition. Nine guest speakers who use GIS in their research and various projects presented on their latest work, among them the construction of a digital time machine using the New York Public Library’s collections, mapping dialect differences in the UK, and smart cities using GIS visualization and bio-sensor data.

The NYU Data Services Team

As in past years, the Mapping Competition accepted entries for paper-format poster submissions and born-digital maps. The winners in each category were:

Paper-based maps:
1st prize: Ari Kaputkin for Transit-oriented Developments since 2010
2nd prize: Awais Malik for Residential Coverage of NYC Hurricane Evacuation Centers
3rd prize: Nicola Macchitella for Madrid Improvement Bike Station Area

Web-based maps:
1st prize: Fei Li for Traffic Accidents in NYC, 2016
2nd prize: Melissa Vise for Seeing and Hearing Things: Medieval Mysticism
3rd prize: Christopher Prince for On the Air: Microwave Traffic in NYC’s Urban Highrise Environment

All of the maps, in both digital and print format, submitted for competition utilized data found in the NYU Spatial Data Repository, which was introduced at last year’s GIS Day.

Winning Entries:

First-prize print map winner Ari Kaputkin’s submission.