Great talks and fun at csv,conf,v3 and Carpentry Training

Posted on by UC Berkeley Library

On May 2 – 5 2017, I (Yasmin AlNoamany) was thrilled to attend the csv,conf,v3 2017 conference and the Software/Data Carpentry instructor training in Portland, Oregon, USA. It was a unique experience to attend and speak with many people who are passionate about data and open science.

The csv,conf,v3

The csv,conf is for data makers from academia, industry, journalism, government, and open source. We had amazing four keynotes by Mike Rostock, the creator of the D3.js (JavaScript library for visualization data), Angela Bassa, the Director of Data Science at iRobot, Heather Joseph, the Executive Director of SPARC, and Laurie Allen, the lead Digital Scholarship Group at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. The conference had four parallel sessions and a series of workshops about data. Check out the full schedule from here.

I presented on the second day about generating stories from archived data, which entitled “Using Web Archives to Enrich the Live Web Experience Through Storytelling”. Check out the slides of my talk below.

 

I demonstrated the steps of the proposed framework, the Dark and Stormy Archives (DSA), in which, we identify, evaluate, and select candidate Web pages from archived collections that summarize the holdings of these collections, arrange them in chronological order, and then visualize these pages using tools that users already are familiar with, such as Storify. For more information about this work, check out this post.

https://twitter.com/HamdanAzhar/status/859851223515582464

The csv,conf deserved to won the conference of the year prize for bringing the CommaLlama. The Alpaca brought much joy and happiness to all conference attendees. It was fascinating to be in csv,conf 2017 to meet and hear from passionate people from everywhere about data.

After the conference, Max Odgen from the Dat Data Project gave us a great tour from the conference venue to South Portland. We had a great food from street food trucks at Portland, then we had a great time with adorable neighborhood cats!

https://twitter.com/yasmina_anwar/status/860017390968492032

Tha Carpentry Training

After the csv,conf, I spent two days with other 30 librarians and researchers from different backgrounds to learn how to instruct Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry.  There were three CLIR fellows, John Borghi, Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati, and myself, attended the training. Completing this training prepares attendees to teach Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry lessons. The Carpentry training is a global movement for teaching scientists in different disciplines the computing skills they need to empower data-driven research and encourage open science.

https://twitter.com/LibCarpentry/status/860571982479241216

The two days had a mix of lectures and hands-on exercises about learning philosophy and Carpentry teaching practices. It was a unique and fascinating experience to have. We had two energetic instructors, Tim Dennis‏ and Belinda Weaver, who generated welcoming and collaborate environment for us. Check out the full schedule and lessons from here.

At the end, I would like to acknowledge the support I had from the California Digital Library and the committee of the csv,conf for giving me this amazing opportunity to attend and speak at the csv,conf and the Carpentry instructor training. I am looking forward to applying what I learned in upcoming Carpentry workshops at UC Berkeley.

–Yasmin