Members of the Data Services team have aggregated a list of resources, data sets, projects, and other information on Indigenous Peoples Day. We hope that you are able to make use of them in your teaching, research, and learning.

Because our tutorials are online, and because we want to reach a broader audience at NYU, we have also listed a handful of offerings at times that are well-suited for those at the NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU Shanghai campuses. The Fall 2020 NYU Go Local list of featured tutorials is as follows:

• Data Visualization with Tableau – September 15, 9pm in New York or September 16, 9am in Shanghai
• Getting Started with Python Pandas – September 16, 9pm in New York or September 17, 9am in Shanghai
• Survey Design with Qualtrics – October 6, 9pm in New York or October 7, 9am in Shanghai
• Python for Harvesting Data on the Web – October 7, 9pm in New York or October 8, 9am in Shanghai
• Data Cleaning and Management Using Python – November 11, 9pm in New York or November 12, 10am in Shanghai
• Introduction to R – October 14, 8pm in New York or October 15, 8am in Shanghai
• Using RSQLite and Shiny Applications to Solve Business Problems – November 18, 7pm in New York or November 19, 8am in Shanghai
• Extracting Geospatial Data with the OverPass API – October 20, 12am in New York, 8am in Abu Dhabi, and 12pm in Shanghai
• Introduction to QGIS – November 9, 11pm in New York, 8am in Abu Dhabi, 12pm (Nov 10) in Shanghai

These tutorials are available to anyone in the NYU community, regardless of current location. They are not recorded because we want anyone who participates to feel comfortable asking questions, sharing examples, or interacting with us as we work through the software. For any questions about registering for Data Services classes, visit the Data Services homepage or email data.services@nyu.edu

Love Data Week: The 2020 U.S. Census

Every 10 years, the decennial census allows the U.S. to fully count its population.  This year, during the national research data initiative Love Data Week, the Division of Libraries will focus its programming on the U.S. Census.  Census data not only determines political representation and federal funding allocations, it also plays and important role in supporting social science research.  The Data Services team has put together a series of speakers and tutorials to bring awareness to the national initiative and examine the many ways the data can be used in scholarship and research.  Many of our most popular tutorials will also be offered to mark Love Data Week.

Speakers

Monday, February 10, 2:00-3:15
“Exploring the Census: Custom Data Extractions”

Frank Donnelly, Geospatial Data Librarian, Baruch College CUNY, Author of Exploring the U.S. census : your guide to America’s data (2019)

After an introduction to the various Census data sources, Frank will demontrate methods for creating custom census data extracts with Python. Participants are welcome to bring a laptop and follow along with the demontration.

Register

Tuesday, February 11, 1:00-2:00
“Counting New York: NYC Census 2020”

Julie Menin, Director, NYC Census 2020

As the Director of NYC Census 2020, Julie Menin organizes extensive outreach efforts to encourage every New York City resident to participate in the upcoming 2020 Census. An accurate census count will ensure that New York receives its fair share of education, healthcare, housing and infrastructure funding and its proper electoral representation in Congress and the electoral college. 

Register

Wednesday, February 12, 1:00-2:00
“The Economic Census”

Lucia S. Foster, Chief, Center for Economic Studies, Economic Indicators Division (EID), US Census Bureau

Every five years, the U.S. Census Bureau collects extensive statistics about businesses that are essential to understanding the American economy. This official count, the Economic Census, serves as the foundation for the measurement of U.S. businesses and their economic impact. Statistics from the economic census are inputs to key measures of the US economy such as the gross domestic product (GDP), product accounts (NIPAs) and the Producer Price Index (PPI).  These resources offer researchers deep and broad insights into the US Economy both today and in the past.

Register

Demonstrations

Social Explorer

Social Explorer offers mapping historical and current U.S. Census Data. 

Register

Data.census.gov

An interactive portal for accessing and downloading all Census Bureau datasets.

Register

Tutorials

• Accessing US Census Data
• Introduction to SPSS
• Writing a Data Management Plan
• Creating Graphics with R
• Text as Data in the Humanities
• Data Visualization with Tableau
• Introduction to MATLAB
• Big Data: MapReduce
• Data Wrangling in Stata

Once again we offered a visualization competition in which entrants could submit a map or visualization to compete for a prize. Our three winners were Yichun Liu, MS candidate in the School of Professional Studies, Emily Fenster, MA candidate in the Department of English, and Patrick Bond, MS candidate in Interdisciplinary Studies.

Liu’s interactive dashboard of plots and maps explores the place of Airbnb in New York City using data on listing pricing and types. Built in Tableau Public, Liu’s visualization can be accessed here.

Fenster’s visual storytelling was built in ESRI StoryMaps using data gleaned from the nineteenth-century missionary work of Henry Chase and the Mariner’s Church among the sailors of New York’s Lower East Side. Follow her visualization story here.

Tableau Public was also the tool of choice used by Bond to build his investigation of terror attacks in the United States between 1970 and 2018, a project built out of data from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

Congratulations to all of our winners and our thanks to the many researchers who submitted entries!

This year iPres was held this year at the EYE Film Museum, the national museum for film located on Amsterdam’s IJ harbour. The conference program included such fun activities like Hackathons and the “Great Digital Preservation Bakeoff” as well as the more traditional conference offerings like a poster and demo session, panels, and paper presentations.

This year at iPres I myself did a fair amount of presenting — I had a panel describing a qualitative study on workplace dissatisfaction amongst digital preservation practitioners (here are the collaborative notes), a poster for the IASGE project (view the poster online), and a paper on a project to archive data journalism (read it on the LIS Scholarship Archive). Even though I was quite busy with all the preparations, given the great spread of the program I was able to attend some wonderful sessions.

So without further ado, here are the 5 things I learned at iPres 2019!

1. Memento Tracer: a framework for scalable high-quality web archiving. Martin Klein led a workshop on Monday afternoon, and you can read the collaborative notes here. Memento has 3 essential parts: a browser extension that records Traces (a set of instructions for capturing the essence of web publications of a certain class, like capturing slides on SlideShare or GitHub repositories), a repository where anyone can upload/download/reuse Traces (this is great, because that means Traces can be versioned! and no one has to reinvent the wheel!), and a headless browser extension that uses Traces as guidance in the process that navigates and captures web publications (so if we have one working Trace for SlideShare, we can use that for all SlideShare slides that we want!). Martin explained that the Memento can be used in conjunction with ORCID to track researchers across all the platforms they use for scholarship and preserve their work. You can see examples of how this works for 16 test (but real!) researchers at: https://myresearch.institute.
2. SARA – Software Archiving of Research Artifacts: this was the poster next to our IASGE poster, and had a very similar goal of preserving academic code! The goal of SARA is to “enable [researchers] to capture the intermediate statuses of their research work already during the process […] The collected research data and the different versions of the associated software tools are therefore traceable for later research.” Right now the requirements for capturing Git repositories is that it must exist in GitLab (which I love!), but I’m going to keep my eye on this project for next steps.
3. The Universal Virtual Interactor (UVI): a part of the Emulation as a Service Infrastructure ecosystem, the UVI is a program that allows users to click on a file (like a CAD file from 1990) and have it open in the original program and computation environment (like AutoCAD 1990 in the appropriate old version of Windows!) using an emulator, in their browser! It also lets users click around and interact (hence the name) with the files and operating systems/old software. It is designed to work for any file, though for files that can be read by any program (like .txt files), this can be tricky — which one should UVI choose? Check out the gif below demonstrating clicking a link to automatically open a Microsoft Works file running in Windows 98 within a web browser (from the UVI DPC blog post):
4. The file formats most present in the Library of Congress’s collections! By far, file extensions for images (.jpg, .tif, .jp2) are the most prevalent in LOC’s digital collections, following by extensions typically associated with documents (.txt, .pdf, and .xml). Even though those are the most common by count, GZip files (.gz) dominate the collection by size. There are roughly 3,937.79 TB worth of .gz files!
5. Setting Up Open Access Repositories: Challenges and Lessons from Palestine: I wasn’t able to attend this presentation sadly (overlapped with one of mine!) but I was really intrigued by the content of the paper, which describes a “holistic approach for deploying open access repositories and building research data management services.” They took four Palestine Universities as case studies here. Given that some of our data and information literacy classes in the library examine the digital occupation of the Gaza Strip, I am also interested to see how this scholarship might be included.