The Catholic University of America Libraries and Department of Information Sciences are excited to announce our Digital Scholarship Workshops designed to equip students, faculty, and staff with the essential skills for modern research. These workshops will cover a range of topics from starting a digital scholarship project to advanced data visualization techniques. Whether you are looking to enhance your citation management with tools like Zotero or RefWorks or dive into the ethical and legal aspects of text data mining, these sessions will provide practical guidance in expanding your digital scholarship toolkit.
Register through the Events page at the Nest (CU members only) or by contacting Kevin Gunn (gunn@cua.edu). All workshops will take place on Zoom, recorded, and made available on the Catholic University Libraries’ YouTube Channel.
Instructors: Benjamin Cushing, Research and Instruction Librarian; Charles Gallagher, Research and Instruction Librarian; Kevin Gunn, Coordinator of Digital Scholarship.
Starting a Digital Scholarship Project (Mon., Sept. 16, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
Planning your project is a critical skill in contemporary research. Many students and faculty embark on a project without understanding fully the resources needed and the time commitment involved. This workshop will walk you through the process of asking the right questions: what is my research question, how can I locate and acquire sources and tools, budgeting concerns, legal issues, and sustaining final outcomes of work accomplished? Instructors: Kevin Gunn, Charles Gallagher.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab (Fri., Sept. 20, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
Learn how to use the lab for locating, analyzing, and visualizing texts. Using Gale’s Primary Sources archive, we will demonstrate the workflow process in building, cleaning, and analyzing content. We will explore some of the tools including document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, parts of speech, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. No previous experience necessary. Instructor: Kevin Gunn
LLMs for Exploratory Data Analysis (Mon., Sept. 30, 12:00 pm – 12:45 pm)
The workshop will cover the basics of using an LLM for performing exploratory data analysis—including generating summary statistics and visualizing various variables—of a dataset. We will look at ChatGPT and Gemini. Instructor: Kevin Gunn
Citation Management with Zotero (Fri., Oct. 11, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
Zotero is a powerful citation management platform designed to streamline the creation of in-text citations and bibliographies. Beyond citation management, it is an invaluable tool for conducting research. This workshop will provide a comprehensive guide to installing Zotero and demonstrate the most effective ways to utilize its features. Participants are encouraged to register for a free Zotero account and download the client prior to the session at https://www.zotero.org/user/register. Instructor: Kevin Gunn
Using OpenRefine for Cleaning Data (Fri., Oct. 18, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
When working with a dataset, have you wondered how to remove ‘null’ or ‘N/A’ from fields, handle different spellings of words, or determining whether a field name is ambiguous? For this workshop, we will use the open access software, OpenRefine, to clean, manipulate, and refine a dataset before analysis (https://openrefine.org/). Instructor: Kevin Gunn
Getting Started with RefWorks (Mon., Oct. 21, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
RefWorks is a web-based reference management tool that allows you to manage your references as you do research in our databases. You can use RefWorks to organize, store and share your references, and to instantly create citations and bibliographies. Come and check out some of its features! Instructor: Benjamin Cushing
Legal and Ethical Issues in Text Data Mining (Mon., Oct. 28, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
I am not sure if I can text data mine a particular dataset. How can I determine what my rights are? We will explore best practices in copyright, fair use, licensing agreements and terms of use, privacy and ethical issues, digital rights management, and other issues involving non-consumptive use of text for research. Part of Open Access Week. Instructor: Kevin Gunn
HathiTrust for Text Data Mining (Fri., Nov. 15, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
You may have used the HathiTrust Digital Library for acquiring books and articles. Now use the HathiTrust Research Center for computational analysis! We will provide an overview of the HTRC platform and features by working on such as finding textual data, creating a workset, and performing basic analyses. Instructors: Benjamin Cushing, Kevin Gunn
Data Visualization Basics (Fri., Dec. 6, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm)
Having performed text data analyses, you must now present your findings visually. Should you use a pie chart (rarely), a scatter plot, or a heat graph? Understand how to present your work in an accurate and ethical manner by joining us for an overview of best practices in data visualization. We will examine some visualization methods and how best to apply them to different kinds of data. Instructors: Charles Gallagher, Kevin Gunn