Data & Digital Scholarship
National Science Foundation Public Access Plan 2.0
Many of you may have already seen, or even read, the NSF Public Access Plan 2.0. This document, disseminated last week, is the National Science Foundation’s response to the OSTP Public Access Memo from August 2022, which requires all federal grant funding agencies to make research publications and their supporting data freely available and accessible, without embargo, no later than December 31, 2025. The public access plan is not the agency’s new policies, but rather the framework for how they will improve public access and address the new requirements. The agency states they will accomplish this prior to the December deadline, on January 31, 2025. I have highlighted just a few points from the report below.
- The agency will leverage the existing NSF Public Access Repository (NSF-PAR) to make research papers, either the author’s accepted manuscript (AAM) or the publisher’s version of record (VOR), available immediately. All papers will be available in machine-readable XML, which will make additional research through text and data mining (TDM) possible.
- The agency will continue to leverage relationships with long-standing disciplinary and generalist data repositories, like Dryad.
- All data and publications will have permanent identifiers (PIDS). Data PIDS will be included with the article metadata.
- The agency acknowledges the complexity in size, type, and quality of documentation with data. Publishing a dataset has far greater technical variability than publishing a manuscript. The agency will continue to explore how to best address data in the next two years.
- The NSF has long required data management plans (DMPs). DMPs will be renamed to “data management and sharing plans,” or DMSPs, to better describe the required documentation and align with other agencies, like the NIH.
The above bullets are a mere 5 items in the lengthy report. Most importantly, over this next year, the Data Collaboration Team will develop an inreach plan to ensure all librarians and staff know how the OSTP memo and resulting policy will impact them and their researchers. Following awareness within the library, we will work on developing a coordinated outreach approach to support our researchers as they adapt to new requirements. This work will be in coordination with the Office of Scholarly Communication Services, the Research Data Management Program, and other longstanding LDSP partners.
Please let us know if you have any questions by sending them to librarydataservices@berkeley.
Data Analysis Workshop Series: partnering with the CDSS Data Science Discovery Consultants
With the increase in data science across all disciplines, most undergraduates will encounter basic data science concepts and be expected to analyze data at some point during their time at UC Berkeley. To address this growing need, the Library Data Services Program began partnering with the Data Science Discovery Consultants in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society (CDSS) on the Introduction to Data Analysis Support workshop series in Fall 2020. The Data Science Discovery Consultants are a group of undergraduates majoring in computer science, math, data science, and related fields who are hired as student employees. They receive training to offer consultation services across a wide range of topics, including Python, R, SQL, and Tableau, and they have existing partnerships with other groups on campus to provide instruction around data as a part of their program. Through the partnership, Data Science Discovery Consultants work with librarians to develop as instructors and gain experience constructing workshops and teaching technical skills. The end result is the creation of a peer-to-peer learning environment for novice undergraduate learners who want to begin working with data. The peer-to-peer learning model lowers the barrier to learning for other undergraduates and enhances motivation and understanding.
The Data Science Discovery Consultants enthusiastically embraced the core values of the Carpentries, through which they empower each other and the audience, collaborate with their community, and create inclusive spaces that welcome and extend empathy and kindness to all learners. In Fall 2022, attendance for the workshop series was opened up to local community college students who may be interested in transferring to UC Berkeley. One of the workshops was taught in Spanish, to provide an environment in which native Spanish speakers could better connect with one another and the content.
Diego Sotomayor, a former UC Berkeley Library student employee and current Data Science Discovery Consultant, taught the inaugural Introduction to Python in Spanish: Introducción al análisis de datos con Python. Diego comments that:
“Languages at events are no longer just a necessity but have gone to the next level of being essential to transmit any relevant information to the interested public. There are many people who only speak Spanish or another language other than English and intend to learn new topics through various platforms including workshops. However, because they are limited by only speaking a language that is not very popular, they get stuck in this desire to progress and learn. Implementing the workshop in different languages, not only in English but in Spanish and even others, is important to give the same opportunities and equal resources to people looking for opportunities.”
The UC Berkeley Library and the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society hope to further provide these offerings for prospective transfer students in Fall 2023. Many thanks to Elliott Smith, Lisa Ngo, Kristina Bush (now at Tufts University), and Misha Coleman in the Library. Anthony Suen is the Library’s staff partner in the Data Science Discovery Program and Kseniya Usovich assists with outreach.
Workshop: HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Wednesday, May 3rd, 2:10-3:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
Stacy Reardon and Kiyoko Shiosaki
If you’ve tinkered in WordPress, Google Sites, or other web publishing tools, chances are you’ve wanted more control over the placement and appearance of your content. With a little HTML and CSS under your belt, you’ll know how to edit “under the hood” so you can place an image exactly where you want it, customize the formatting of text, or troubleshoot copy & paste issues. By the end of this workshop, interested learners will be well-prepared for a deeper dive into the world of web design. Register here.
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
Workshop: By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
Thursday, April 6th, 3:10-4:30pm
Location: Doe 223
Lynn Cunningham
In this hands-on workshop, we will learn how to create web graphics for your digital publishing projects and websites. We will cover topics such as: sources for free public domain and Creative Commons images; image resolution for the web; and basic image editing tools in Photoshop. If possible, please bring a laptop with Photoshop installed. (All UCB faculty and students can receive a free Adobe Creative Suite license: https://software.berkeley.edu/adobe) Register here.
Upcoming Workshops in this Series – Spring 2022:
- HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
Workshop: “Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?”: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
“Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?”: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
Wednesday, March 8th, 11:10am-12:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
Tim Vollmer and Stacy Reardon
If you are working on a computational text analysis project and have wondered how to legally acquire, use, and publish text and data, this workshop is for you! We will teach you 5 legal literacies (copyright, contracts, privacy, ethics, and special use cases) that will empower you to make well-informed decisions about compiling, using, and sharing your corpus. By the end of this workshop, and with a useful checklist in hand, you will be able to confidently design lawful text analysis projects or be well-positioned to help others design such projects. Consider taking alongside Copyright and Fair Use for Digital Projects. Register here.
Upcoming Workshops in this Series – Spring 2022:
- By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
- HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
Text Analysis with Archival Materials: Gale Digital Scholar Lab
Text Analysis with Archival Materials: Gale Digital Scholar Lab
Thursday, February 16th, 2:00-3:00pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
The Gale Digital Scholar Lab is a platform that allows researchers to do text data mining on archival collections available through Gale (see list below). During this session we’ll cover the workflow for using the Lab, focusing on the Build, Clean, and Analyze steps. We’ll review curating and creating a content set, developing clean configurations, applying text data mining analysis tools, and exporting your Lab results. We’ll also review new Lab updates and explore the Lab Learning Center.
Primary source collections available in Gale include: American Fiction, 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection, American Civil Liberties Union Papers, 1912-1990, American Fiction, Archives Unbound, Archives of Sexuality & Gender, British Library Newspapers, The Economist Historical Archive, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Indigenous Peoples: North America, The Making of Modern Law, The Making of the Modern World, Nineteenth Century Collections Online, Nineteenth Century U.S. Newspapers, Sabin Americana, 1500-1926, The Times Digital Archive, The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, U.S. Declassified Documents Online
This event is part of the UC-wide “Love Data Week” series of talks, presentations, and workshops to be held February 13-17, 2023. All events are free to attend and open to any member of the UC community. To see a full list of UC Love Data Week 2023 events, please visit: https://bit.ly/UC-LDW
Related LibGuide: Text Mining & Computational Text Analysis by Stacy Reardon
Workshop: Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks
Publish Digital Books & Open Educational Resources with Pressbooks
Wednesday, February 8th, 11:10am-12:30pm
Online: Register to receive the Zoom link
Tim Vollmer
If you’re looking to self-publish work of any length and want an easy-to-use tool that offers a high degree of customization, allows flexibility with publishing formats (EPUB, PDF), and provides web-hosting options, Pressbooks may be great for you. Pressbooks is often the tool of choice for academics creating digital books, open textbooks, and open educational resources, since you can license your materials for reuse however you desire. Learn why and how to use Pressbooks for publishing your original books or course materials. You’ll leave the workshop with a project already under way! Register here.
Upcoming Workshops in this Series – Spring 2022:
- Can I Mine That? Should I Mine That?: A Clinic for Copyright, Ethics & More in TDM Research
- By Design: Graphics & Images Basics
- HTML/CSS Toolkit for Digital Projects
Please see bit.ly/dp-berk for details.
Come Help Us Create Wikipedia and Create Change, Edit by Edit, on February 15, 2023!
Wikipedia has become so central to our lives that we count on it to represent reality, and solid fact. When we encounter a new phenomenon, we check out our trusty online friend for more information. So, it was fascinating to me recently to see the lines blur between fiction and reality, when Wikipedia was used as a visual and social cue in the movie Tár, starring Cate Blanchett, about a famed female conductor. In the movie, one of the clues to the coming turbulence in Lydia Tár’s life is a screen capture of a mystery editor changing items on the conductor’s Wikipedia entry. It looked and felt so real, the filming and Blanchett’s performance so rivetingly vivid, that many people believed the film was a biopic of a real person. As Brooke LaMantia wrote in her article, No, Lydia Tar is Not Real,
“When I left the theater after watching Tár for two hours and 38 minutes, I immediately fumbled for my phone. I couldn’t wait to see actual footage of the story I had just seen and was so ready for my Wikipedia deep dive to sate me during my ride home. But when I frantically typed “Lydia Tar?” into Google as I waited for my train, I was greeted with a confusing and upsetting realization: Lydia Tár is not real…the film’s description on Letterboxd — “set in the international world of classical music, centers on Lydia Tár, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra” — is enough to make you believe Tár is based on a true story. The description was later added to a Wikipedia page dedicated to “Lydia Tár,” but ahead of the film’s October 28 wide release, that page has now been placed under a broader page for the movie as a whole. Was this some sort of marketing sleight of hand or just a mistake I stumbled upon? Am I the only one who noticed this? I couldn’t be, right? I thought other people had to be stuck in that same cycle of questioning: Wait, this has to be real. Or is it? She’s not a real person?
Wikipedia is central to LaMantia’s questioning! While it’s easy to understand people’s confusion in general, the Tár Wikipedia page, created by editors like you and like me, is very clear that this is a film, at least as of today’s access date, January 20, 2023… On the other hand, did you know you can click on the “View History” link on the page, and see every edit that has been made to it, since it was created, and who made that edit? If you look at the page resulting from one of the edits from October 27, 2022, you can see that it does look like Tár is a real person, and in fact, a person who later went on to edit this entry to make it clearer wrote, “Reading as it was, it is not clear if Lydia actually exists.” Maybe I should write to LaMantia and let her know.
I tell this story to show that clearly, Wikipedia is a phenomenon, and a globally central one, which makes it all the more amazing that it is created continuously, edit by edit, editor by editor. There are many ways in which our own and your own edits can create change, lead to social justice, correct misinformation and more. While it’s easy to get lost in the weeds of minute changes to esoteric entries, it’s also possible to improve pages on important figures in real-life history and bring them into our modern narrative and consciousness. And it’s easy to do!
If you are interested in learning more, and being part of this central resource, we warmly welcome you and invite you to join us on Wednesday, February 15, from 1-2:30 for our 2023 Wikipedia Editathon, part of the University of Calif0rnia-wide 2023 Love Data Week. No experience is required—we will teach you all you need to know about editing! (but, if you want to edit with us in real time, please create a Wikipedia account before the workshop). The link to register is here, and you can contact any of the workshop leaders (listed on the registration page) with questions. We look forward to editing with you!
Coming Soon: Love Your Data, from Editathons to Containers!
UC Berkeley has been loving its data for a long time, and has been part of the international movement which is Love Data Week (LDW) since at least 2016, even during the pandemic! This year is no exception—the UC Berkeley Libraries and our campus partners are offering some fantastic workshops (four of which are led by our very own librarians) as part of the University of California-wide observance.
Love Data Week 2023 is happening next month, February 13-17 (it’s always during the week of Valentine’s Day)!
UC Berkeley Love Data Week offerings for 2023 include:
Wikipedia Edit-a-thon (you can also dip into Wikidata at other LDW events)
Textual Analysis with Archival Materials
Getting Started with Qualitative Data Analysis
All members of the UC community are welcome—we hope you will join us! Registration links for our offerings are above, and the full UC-wide calendar is here. If you are interested in learning more about what the library is doing with data, check out our new Data + Digital Scholarship Services page. And, feel free to email us at librarydataservices@berkeley.edu. Looking forward to data bonding next month!
Workshop Reminder—Copyright & Fair Use for Digital Projects
Workshop Date/Time: Tuesday, November 8, 2022, 11:00am–12:30pm
RSVP for Zoom link
This training from the Library’s Office of Scholarly Communication Services will help you navigate the copyright, fair use, and usage rights of including third-party content in your digital project. Whether you seek to embed video from other sources for analysis, post material you scanned from a visit to the archives, add images, upload documents, or more, understanding the basics of copyright and discovering a workflow for answering copyright-related digital scholarship questions will make you more confident in your project. We will also provide an overview of your intellectual property rights as a creator and ways to license your own work.
Please sign up today and join us on November 8.