Data Carpentry on The Carpentries

Join the Data Carpentry Governance Committee

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Join the Data Carpentry Governance Committee and help guide the strategic development of the project!

Following the successful recruitment of new members to Governance Committees for Library Carpentry and Software Carpentry, we are calling for volunteers from the Data Carpentry community to become Lesson Program Governors for the project.

What is a Lesson Program Governor?

LPGCs oversee the strategy of the lesson program, advocate for the project in their networks, and act as a point of contact for the project e.g., liaising with the Board of Directors, the Core Team, and the wider community. Learn more about the powers and responsibilities of the committees in a previous blog post and check out the Lesson Program Governors Handbook for other resources that support this community role.

Upcoming Changes to Self-Organised Workshops: Ensuring Sustainability and Continued Community Impact

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are writing to inform the community about changes to Self-Organised workshops (SOWs). Due to rising costs, The Carpentries is introducing a fee for Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances used in Data Carpentry Genomics workshops. Furthermore, we have updated the definition and submission guidelines for SOWs. These workshops are vital in advancing The Carpentries’ mission and vision, significantly contributing to the organisation’s overall impact. We sincerely appreciate your efforts in organising and supporting them, as we recognise that they provide an accessible opportunity to teach Carpentries material.

The Carpentries’ Websites Relaunched!

Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are pleased to announce that today, 18 November, we have relaunched the main Carpentries website and the three lesson program websites! All four websites have been redesigned to allow for integrated navigation between them, allowing the viewer to navigate to any other one of the websites from another. The URLs for the main Carpentries website, as well as the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry websites all remain the same.

Recently, we outlined how the websites were redesigned to provide an overview of The Carpentries, primarily for the general public, Carpentries member organisations, funders, and sponsors, as well as new members to the community or members who would like a refresher on The Carpentries’ core operations and community structure.

Almost Ready: The Carpentries’ new websites and Handbooks

Wed, 30 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

We shared that The Carpentries is on a journey towards consolidating its resources and lesson programs - Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry - under one unified identity. To achieve this goal, we migrated the blog posts from the three lesson program websites to The Carpentries main blog. Shortly after that, we announced that the content on these lesson programs’ websites was pared down to only display each lesson program’s lessons, past and upcoming workshops, and its governance structure, with all other content incorporated into the main website of The Carpentries.

Lesson programs' websites content pared down

Tue, 30 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The content on the three Carpentries lesson programs websites - Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, and Library Carpentry - has been pared down to only display each lesson program’s lessons, past and upcoming workshops, and its governance structure. All other content pertaining to each lesson program has been incorporated into the main website of The Carpentries. Users of the satellite websites can be redirected from the lesson program websites to The Carpentries website. This change was effected on 29 July 2024.

New R Ecology Lesson Released

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Those visiting the Data Carpentry Data Analysis and Visualisation in R for Ecologists lesson today might notice things have changed! The redesigned version of the lesson, approved for adoption by the Curriculum Advisory Committee earlier this year, has now replaced the previous content.

The former version was released to Zenodo before the redesigned content was merged into the lesson, and the files and folders of that version can be downloaded from there or accessed through the history of the lesson repository.

Curriculum Advisors Approve Redesigned DC R Ecology Lesson

Wed, 27 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are delighted to announce that a redesigned version of the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists lesson has been approved for adoption into the Data Carpentry Ecology curriculum. The redesigned version will replace the existing lesson later this year. The Curriculum Advisory Committee previously published a call for Instructors to test the lesson and provide feedback, which includes a summary of the differences between the two lessons.

The new lesson lets learners dive into data visualisation much more quickly, letting you quickly appreciate the benefits of the lesson and enticing you to learn more about data storage, manipulation and analysis as the lesson progresses. The new structure of the lesson helps make it more approachable for beginners and more motivating for all learners, and has received great feedback from Instructors who have taught the lesson so far.

Lesson programs' blog posts migration

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As of today, blog posts will no longer appear on the three lesson program websites. All blog posts that were on the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry websites are now merged with the blog posts at The Carpentries blog.

In addition to this change, you will also see a pagination feature at the bottom of the list of blog posts to cycle through the list of posts. Also, you will see a new sidebar that lets you view the entire blog archive or browse posts by author or browse posts by tag.

Beta Testing an Alternative Version of R Ecology lesson

Mon, 10 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The Data Carpentry: Ecology Curriculum Advisory Committee has approved a redesigned version of the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologists lesson for beta testing. Curriculum Advisors invite the Data Carpentry community to teach this alternative version of the lesson and provide feedback, to inform their discussions as they consider formally adopting it and replacing the current version in the curriculum.

About the Redesigned Lesson

The lesson was redesigned and developed by Michael Culshaw-Maurer in The Carpentries Incubator during his tenure in The Carpentries Curriculum Team as a post-doc at CyVerse.

Welcoming the New Lesson Program Governance Committees

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am delighted to announce the new Lesson Program Governance Committees for Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry. These committees will provide community leadership for each lesson program, with responsibility to oversee project strategy, advocate for the lesson program and its community, and to communicate with the Executive Council, the Core Team, and the Carpentries community as a whole.

These committees are essential to the long-term health of The Carpentries as a community-led organisation, and I am deeply grateful to the following community members for stepping into the role.

Launching Data Carpentry: Image Processing with Python

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I am thrilled to announce the first official release of the new Data Carpentry curriculum, Image Processing with Python. In November 2022, the Curriculum Advisory Committee met and approved a motion to move the lesson out of beta testing and into stable status. Version 1.0.0 of the curriculum was published to Zenodo last week. This means the curriculum is now available for teaching in official Data Carpentry workshops.

Curriculum Content

The Image Processing with Python curriculum teaches the concepts and skills needed to write automated processing pipelines for image data. Using examples from morphometrics, the curriculum covers the steps of a typical image processing workflow: loading images, masking, blurring and thresholding data, and ends with a capstone challenge to provide a chance for additional practice. Like Foundations of Astronomical Data Science, released in April 2022, this curriculum consists on a single lesson, designed to be taught over two full days or four half-days.

Calling for Volunteers to join a Lesson Program Governance Committee

Tue, 24 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This post was updated on 3rd February 2023, extending the deadline for applications to the end of Wednesday 15th February 2023 Anywhere on Earth.

The Carpentries has three lesson programs, Software Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Data Carpentry. In November, I published a post describing the governance structure of each lesson program, and outlining a plan to introduce more community governance in the form of Lesson Program Governance Committees (LPGCs). Today, 24 January we open the call for volunteers to form these new committees. The call for volunteers will remain open until the end of 5th February, and I encourage anyone interested in community leadership and guiding the development of one of the lesson programs to apply.

Planning for Lesson Program Governance Committees

Mon, 21 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In January 2023, The Carpentries will call for community leaders to volunteer to join Lesson Program Governance Committees for Software Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Data Carpentry.

Where We Have Been

The Carpentries was formed in January 2018, after Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merged to form a single organisation. Our third lesson program, Library Carpentry, joined in November that year, and the structure of the organisation has remained relatively stable ever since. Before the merger, Software Carpentry & Data Carpentry had Steering Committees, which combined into a single entity when the two organisations agreed to merge, and became the first Executive Council of The Carpentries, following an election of new members in late 2017.

Foundations of Astronomical Data Science Launch

Tue, 05 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with astronomical data is now available to teach! The Foundations of Astronomical Data Science curriculum was actively developed during the COVID-19 pandemic by the Astronomy Curriculum Data Carpentry Committee (ACDC; composed of Erin Becker, Azalee Bostroem, Allen Downey, Rodolfo Montez Jr., Brett Morris, and Phil Rosenfield) and has undergone The Carpentries incubation process including two alpha workshops and two beta workshops. The first official offering of the stable curriculum will be at the summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) this June in Pasadena, CA. This is the first new curriculum released by The Carpentries since August 2018 and represents the first curriculum designed for intermediate learners! The curriculum is now ready for any certified Instructor to teach! Keep reading to learn more.

Running an Online Data Carpentry Workshop in Iran

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It was my aim for a long time since I started to learn basics of programming in Python in 2017. I was excited to teach whatever I learned to other people and extend it. I am an analytical biologist and I have a lot of colleagues who were searching for someone speaking Persian to learn programming skills from.

I think learning in a maternal language is crucial to make the lessons more efficient. Teaching Data Carpentry could help them to make their own way in their research projects and improve the quality of their studies. I planned this workshop two months after I got my certificate as an instructor of The Carpentries. Because of COVID-19, the workshop in Iran was to be online too. Good for me! I participated in several online workshops around the world such as in the US and South Africa to learn and have experiences in teaching in online workshops and become an experienced instructor.

Reflections on my First Data Carpentry Workshop

Tue, 13 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This blog post was originally posted by the author on Medium and has been cross-posted here with the permission of the author.

It was 6:00 AM GMT on 28th September 2020, a Monday morning in Ghana and I was up and ready behind my computer, taking a final glance through the materials for my participation in a Data Carpentries Workshop, organized by SADiLaR (South African Center for Digital Language Resources) in partnership with the Carpentries in Africa.

Geospatial Data Carpentry Videos

Wed, 19 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

TL;DR

Instructors at the University of Wisconsin (at both Madison and Milwaukee) recorded videos of the Geospatial Data Carpentry Workshop They then held discussion sessions over the course of a week to discuss the videos the learners had watched Learners really enjoyed this setup and gave really good feedback. Instructors are still working on setting expectations about the setup better.

The Setup

Since mid-March, when the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus announced it would be temporarily closing, exploring methods for successfully teaching interactive coding workshops has been a continual discussion among our local community of Carpentries instructors. As The Carpentries staff like to say, the transition to online workshops has been a “chopportunity” (challenge-opportunity).

Genomics Workshop Pilot and BugBBQ at University of Arizona

Wed, 15 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This February, a small group of committed community members, led by Taylor Reiter at the University of California, Davis, completed a major update to the Data Carpentry Genomics curriculum. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed! This update included significant changes to both the data set and the software used for the lessons, modernizing the workshop and keeping it relevant to researchers working in the genomics field. The new version of this curriculum is already live and will be officially published in the upcoming lesson release in June.

Traducción al español de Ecología con Python, una lección de Data Carpentry

Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Read the English version of this blog post here.

Entre septiembre de 2017 y mayo de 2018 desarrollamos una iniciativa impulsada por la comunidad para traducir las lecciones de Software Carpentry al español. Su resultado fue la producción de tres lecciones de alta calidad, que pueden utilizarse para enseñar un taller de Software Carpentry consistente de La Terminal de Unix, Control de Versiones con Git, y R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles.

El siguiente paso lógico para potenciar la cartera de lecciones en español de The Carpentries era traducir una lección de Data Carpentry basada en Python. En noviembre de 2018 iniciamos y completamos un esfuerzo comunitario para crear Análisis y visualización de datos usando Python.

Data Carpentry Python Ecology Lesson Translated into Spanish

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Lee la versión en español de esta publicación aquí.

From September 2017 to May 2018, there was a community-driven effort to translate the Software Carpentry lessons into Spanish, and the result was the production of three high-quality lessons that can be used to teach a Software Carpentry Workshop consisting of La Terminal de Unix, Control de Versiones con Git, and R para Análisis Científicos Reproducibles.

The next logical step to enhance The Carpentries portfolio of Spanish lessons was to translate a Python-based Data Carpentry lesson. In November 2018, we initiated and completed a community-driven project to create Análisis y visualización de datos usando Python.

Data Carpentry for Atmosphere and Ocean Scientists

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Back in late 2012, I was a couple of years into my first job out of college. My undergraduate studies had left me somewhat underprepared for the coding associated with analyzing climate model data for a national science organization, so I was searching online for assistance with Python programming. I stumbled upon the website of an organization called Software Carpentry, which at the time was a relatively small group of volunteers running two-day scientific computing “bootcamps” for researchers. I reached out to ask if they’d be interested in running a workshop alongside the 2013 Annual Conference of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (AMOS), and to my surprise Greg Wilson - the co-founder of the organization - flew out to Australia to teach at our event in Melbourne and another in Sydney (the first ever bootcamps outside of North America and Europe). I trained up as an instructor soon after, and from 2014-2017 I hosted Software Carpentry workshops alongside the AMOS conference, as well as other ad hoc workshops in various meteorology and oceanography departments.

Geospatial Workshop is Now Ready to Teach!

Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The long-awaited Data Carpentry curriculum for working with Geospatial data is now ready to teach! As with all our newly developed curricula, these lessons are now in ‘beta’. We are actively promoting workshops and collecting information from those workshops to improve these lessons as they are taught more broadly and in different contexts. We will also be onboarding Instructors to prepare them to teach these new lessons. Keep reading for more details.

Social Sciences Lessons Published!

Thu, 17 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce the initial release of a Data Carpentry Social Sciences Curriculum. This is the first Data Carpentry Curriculum to be released targeted towards researchers outside of the life sciences and provides an opportunity to reach out to new communities.

Peter Smyth has assembled the initial content for these lessons with the guidance of Rachel Gibson, Professor of Political Science at the Cathie Marsh Institute of Social Research, University of Manchester, UK. It was polished during the April 2018 Bug BBQ, and the finishing was done by the lesson Maintainers in coordination with Carpentries staff.

An extended Data Carpentry Workshop over 7 weeks instead of 2 days

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Background

The UF R Users Group was formed in January 2017, and since then we’ve been running a weekly “UF R Meetup”: A two-hour session consists of a 30 to 60 minute presentation/tutorials followed by an “open lab” session. The meetup is meant to be a casual, informal opportunity to learn as a community, and seek face-to-face advice.

By the end of the second semester of running the meetup, we had identified a couple of issues:

Launching The Carpentries Website

Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Website Launch

We are excited to announce that The Carpentries website is now live!

The new website celebrates our merged identity as The Carpentries.

The new website will give you access to all things ‘Carpentries’, in other words, it will give you easy access to what is common information across the merged organization. The sorts of things you will find there include our Code of Conduct, information about instructor training and assessment, a range of shared policies, including our privacy policy, details of staffing and project governance, and a whole lot more.

Updates on the new Geospatial and Social Sciences lessons

Thu, 19 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In December 2017, we made a call for community members to contribute to two new sets of Data Carpentry lessons, targeted towards researchers working with geospatial data or survey data for the social sciences.

There was overwhelming interest from the community in working to develop and publish these two curricula. In the past few months, six new Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons, and five new Maintainers for the Social Sciences lessons have gone through Maintainer onboarding and begun to work with their lessons. Please join our community in welcoming Chris Prener, Geoff LaFlair, Peter Smyth, Juan Fung, Stephen Childs, Tyson Swetnam, Lauren O’Brien, Janani Selvaraj, and Lachlan Deer as new Maintainers on these lessons (Chris Prener and Juan Fung will serve as Maintainers for both the Geospatial and the Social Sciences lessons), as well as Leah Wasser and Joseph Stachelek, who will be continuing on as Maintainers for the Geospatial lessons.

Building Library Carpentry Community and Development

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce that Chris Erdmann has been hired as the Library Carpentry Community and Development Director starting May 4, 2018.

Chris has worked in libraries for more than 21 years to integrate data management and workflows in database and library systems. Through training, consulting and tool development to build programs, he has tried to empower people in research and library communities to work effectively with data. Chris received his MLIS at the University of Washington iSchool while working at the University’s Technology Transfer Office, where he helped automate workflows and develop the unit’s web presence and analytics. He spent roughly ten years working alongside astronomers at the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to advance library data-mining and linking services, e.g. ESO Telescope Bibliography. Also during this time, he led an experimental training series called Data Scientist Training for Librarians (DST4L) geared towards teaching librarians data-savvy skills to help transform their library services to meet the needs of their research communities. He recently joined the Library Carpentry governance group.

Volunteering for CarpentryCon 2018

Thu, 12 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The first inaugural CarpentryCon is less than 50 days away! The taskforce is diligently working to make sure all t’s are crossed and I’s are dotted to ensure that the Community enjoys a wonderful un-conference. While doing so, we have realized that we need one more thing…YOU!!!

Have you had a desire to get involved with the planning of CarpentryCon and did not have the time? Or maybe, you felt as though you did not know where you could be most valued? Or maybe, you thought the taskforce had everything under control and did not need your help?

Launching our New Handbook

Wed, 11 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

As The Carpentries, we’re excited to announce that we have consolidated and updated many materials and resources to more easily share them online and be a community resource.

Today we are launching an all-new The Carpentries Handbook. We will also be tweeting regularly through a new Carpentries Twitter account.

The Carpentries Handbook

We are excited to release our new Carpentries Handbook! Historically, information and resources have been spread across various websites, Google docs, GitHub repos, and more. We now have a one-stop shop that consolidates all these resources. In one place, you can now find information on how to run a workshop, how to develop and maintain lessons, and how to participate in an instructor training event. You’ll also learn about getting the word out about Carpentries activities through our communication channels, and how to get involved in our global community. Many, many thanks to all the community members who helped develop this site.

Developing GitHub labels for The Carpentries lessons

Thu, 05 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In November and December of 2017, we conducted a series of interviews with lesson Maintainers. You can read the summary and see a link to the full report on this blog post. A major theme that emerged from the interviews was that the Maintainers’ jobs were sometimes difficult because it was not always clear what was expected from them or how much authority they have on deciding what can be changed in the content of the lessons. To begin to address these issues, we developed an onboarding for new Maintainers to clarify the role and responsibilities of Maintainers. We also created Curriculum Advisory Committees for the different curricula, to offer high-level guidance on lesson structure and technology choices.

Mentoring Groups Open for Multiple Timezones

Wed, 04 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Did you miss the deadline to join a mentoring group? Do not fear, there are still openings for mentees to join groups in the following timezones:

To join, fill out this application.

Mentoring groups are beneficial to participants because group members are able to focus on specific goals, including teaching their first workshop and developing new lesson contribution material. Being a part of a group that addresses something important to you is both powerful and enjoyable. You do not want to miss out on the Carpentries mentoring opportunities. Join a mentoring group today!

How to be involved in the Bug BBQ?

Tue, 03 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Remind me…

When is the Bug BBQ?

It starts on April 12th, 9am Eastern (US) and ends on April 13th, 5pm Pacific (US) (click on the links to see these dates and times for your timezone).

What is the Bug BBQ? Why are we doing one?

You can read more about this in the announcement post.

What is the website with all the info?

https://carpentries.github.io/2018-04-bug-bbq/

DC Genomics Workshop, UC Davis, January 2018

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

From January 24-25 (Thursday and Friday) we held a Data Carpentry Genomics workshop at UC Davis, led by Sue McClatchy. This was a “sold out” workshop, which filled up about a day after the registration went live. This indicates to us that we should host it again!

Overall, it was a great workshop. The learning workflow included:

Data organization and management -> Introduction to the shell -> Downloading sequencing data files -> QC (fastqc and trimming) -> Assembly -> Variant calling

Webinar with Rochelle Tractenberg: Debrief

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On February 2, the Assessment Network held a well-attended webinar with Rochelle Tractenberg. Dr. Tractenberg holds two PhDs, one in Cognitive Sciences and the other in Statistics, and directs the Collaborative for Research on Outcomes and Metrics at Georgetown University, where she is a tenured professor in the Department of Neurology. It was a great privilege for our community to be able to engage in a conversation with her and to learn from her expertise.

Welcome to New Trainers

Wed, 14 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to welcome seventeen newly badged Trainers to our community. The group recently finished their program with Karen Word and are now certified to teach new Carpentry Instructors.

Join us in welcoming Tania Allard, Anne C. Axel, Mik Black, Murray Cadzow, Mesfin Diro, Caroline Fadeke Ajilogba, Anne Fouilloux, Alejandra Gonzalez-Beltran, Claire Hardgrove, Toby Hodges, SherAaron Hurt, Senzo Mpungose, David Perez-Suarez, Juliane Schneider, Nicholas Tierney, Jessica Upani, Elizabeth Williams.

Mentoring Groups are Back!

Mon, 12 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In February, we held our mentoring groups virtual showcase, and community members engaged with mentors and mentees virtually to hear about the accomplishments they made over the course of their mentoring experience. Not only were mentees able to finish their instructor checkout tasks and contribute to the CarpentryCon taskforce, mentors started local communities and reconnected with community members globally.

You’ve expressed to us and each other the benefits these mentoring groups have had on your growth in and outside of the Carpentries. You are building powerful, and meaningful connections by developing peer communities. Because of that, we want to continue to support these groups, and give more community members the opportunity to join, either as a mentor, or a mentee.

Call for Code of Conduct Committee Volunteers

Thu, 08 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are dedicated to developing and empowering a diverse community of data enthusiasts. Whether you are an Instructor, learner, Maintainer, Mentor, Trainer, Executive Council member, Champion, or member of our Staff, you belong to this community. We are committed to creating avenues for you to contribute that are welcoming and inclusive, whether in-person or online.

Our Code of Conduct (CoC) serves a vital role in this commitment, as it outlines our commitment to provide a welcoming and supportive environment to all people regardless of who you are, or where you come from. Our CoC outlines very detailed reporting guidelines and an enforcement policy, so that, should violations occur, members of our community can rest assured that their concerns are being handled appropriately and in a timely manner.

Announcing the first joint Carpentries Bug BBQ

Wed, 07 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Bug BBQ is a Carpentry-wide event to improve all our lessons – both existing Software and Data Carpentry lessons, and new releases. We welcome contributions from the Community on all of our lessons. If you want to contribute, but you are not sure where to start, head over to the Bug BBQ website where we will highlight how to get involved.

The Carpentries are preparing to publish the Social Sciences and the Geospatial Data Carpentry curricula on Zenodo. The Social Science Lessons will be published in April, and the Geospatial Lessons in June. This will be the first publication for these lessons. We regularly publish our lessons (SWC, DC) to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

Call for Contributions: Data Carpentry Ecology and Software Carpentry Curriculum Advisory Committees

Mon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In mid-2017, Data Carpentry piloted a Curriculum Advisory Committee (CAC) for the Genomics curriculum. The goals for this committee were to provide general oversight, vision, and leadership for the full Genomics lesson stack, to ensure that the lessons stay up-to-date with existing best practices in the field, and to continue to serve the needs of genomics practitioners attending our workshops. Genomics Curriculum Advisors met after the initial Genomics lesson publication in November to discuss proposed structural and major topical changes to the lessons and will be helping the Genomics Maintainer team to make decisions about these changes as we prepare for a second release this year.

State of the State: Instructor Checkout

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This blog post is the second in a series examining the roles and contributions of the different parts of the Carpentry community. In case you missed it - read the first post in this series, about Maintainers.

Carpentry Instructors are the core of our community. Without Instructors, there would be no workshops. Because of the vital role that Instructors play in advancing the Carpentry mission, we as a community take preparing Instructors very seriously. Before becoming certified Instructors, trainees must show familiarity with our curriculum, demonstrate their teaching skills (with a focus on the Carpentry pedagogical model), and interact with the broader Carpentry community. Software Carpentry Instructors also need to demonstrate familiarity with Git and GitHub.

Mentoring Groups Showcase their Accomplishments

Thu, 15 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website We just finished our second round of mentoring groups and had an amazing showcase of their work and ideas. In this round, we were more specific and focused on multiple topic areas. There were groups on community building, lesson maintenance, and preparing for instructor checkout.

The feedback and outcomes were great! Participants were able to focus on specific goals, including teaching their first workshop and developing new lesson contribution material. Being a part of a group that addressed something important to them, (ex. developing communities in Japan and Singapore), made the mentoring groups powerful and enjoyable.

Valerie Aurora to Keynote at CarpentryCon 2018

Wed, 14 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are excited to announce that Valerie Aurora will be one of four keynote speakers at this May’s CarpentryCon in Dublin.

Valerie is a software engineer turned diversity and inclusion consultant.

We want CarpentryCon 2018 to be a truly global, diverse and inclusive event, which is why we are so happy that Valerie has accepted our offer to speak there.

Scaling Collaborative Curriculum Development for Data Skills Training

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce that we have received a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to train researchers in essential data skills and build a general framework for collaborative lesson development to scale data training. This grant will allow us to create general infrastructure, guidelines and pathways for community engagement to establish open source lesson development as a practice and enable scalable, collaborative data training. Curriculum developed through this grant will include economics, image analysis and chemistry. This work will be a proving ground for the establishment of infrastructure and processes for collaborative and open lesson development in other domains and topics.

Unveiling the Carpentries Logo

Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Now that Software and Data Carpentry have merged, we wanted a new logo to celebrate our coming together as the Carpentries, and to give that project its own distinct identity.

The new logo retains a ‘Carpentry’ feel - at the basic level, it represents a wrench around a hexagonal bolt. Yet it also conveys a sense of exhilaration and celebration - that magic moment when you ‘get’ something and your arms shoot up in celebration. There are many such ‘aha!’ moments in Carpentries’ workshops, so it is fitting that our logo represent not just the hard work of learning (the wrench) but the satisfaction of achievement and mastery that we gain (the ‘Yay!’).

Expanding Library Carpentry: Hiring a Library Carpentry Coordinator

Fri, 02 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

California Digital Library is hiring for a Library Carpentry Project Coordinator!

Job posting and application

The deadline for the Library Carpentry Project Coordinator position has just been extended. New deadline February 21, 2018.

California Digital Library is looking to hire a Library Carpentry Coordinator who will work with The Carpentries to further develop Library Carpentry and continue to build a community and curriculum. A successful Library Carpentry Coordinator is passionate about bringing data skills and perspectives to the library community and supporting libraries in building local capacity for training. The Library Carpentry Coordinator will use product management skills, project management skills, software/data skills, and knowledge of the Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry community to promote and expand the reach of the Library Carpentry across the US. While this is a US based position, the work done will be integrated with and support the efforts of the global Library Carpentry community. Applications are open, and the deadline is February 21, 2018.

State of the State: Carpentry Maintainers

Wed, 31 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

All of the great work that we do as The Carpentries is dependent on the hard work and creativity of our community of volunteers. Each of you plays a vital role in helping us fulfill our mission of spreading data skills and computational literacy to researchers and other professionals worldwide. Within our Carpentry community, there are a number of subcommunities of like-minded folks carrying out particular aspects of the Carpentry mission. This blog post is the first in a series focusing on one of our sub-communities - the Maintainers.

Carpentries Transition From Fiscally Sponsored Project to NumFOCUS Community Alliance Member

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry have combined their separate projects into a new project, now known as The Carpentries.

As part of this transition, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are moving from Fiscally Sponsored Projects with NumFOCUS to The Carpentries with Community Initiatives, whose fiscal sponsorship administration services are better aligned with our emerging needs. The Carpentries looks forward to new opportunities with NumFOCUS and will continue to participate in the NumFOCUS Community as a new member of the NumFOCUS Community Alliance.

A Look Back and A Look Ahead from the Data Carpentry Steering Committee

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On May 8-9, 2014 Data Carpentry hosted its first workshop at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). That workshop came out of an identified unmet need for the skills and perspectives to work effectively and reproducibly with data, as data became more pervasive in many areas of research. The biggest difference from other trainings, including Software Carpentry, was not so much what we taught (specific tools), but how we taught it – with a focus on data management and analysis rather than writing software. In all our workshops, we use real publicly available data and the workshop is a narrative, going from start (data and project organization) to finish (analysis and visualization) through the course of the workshop, providing an onramp to using data skills in friendly, accessible workshops. The goal is to teach skills, and even more importantly, to show people what’s possible, and that they can do it, so people have the confidence and enthusiasm to go on to learn more and use these skills in their own research.

New Year Message from the Carpentries' Executive Director

Thu, 11 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

One of my favorite sticky note moments involved two sticky notes, red and green, folded into origami cranes, that I received after a workshop. Maybe it was just idle hands working away during an explanatory section, but it seemed to me to be a quiet ’thank you’ for the workshop, one that recognized that there were both good things and bad things in the process of learning, but that they could balance out and create something new and beautiful.

The Centrality of the Code of Conduct

Wed, 10 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This is the first in a series of posts about Carpentries’ teaching practices. Subsequent posts will cover the other practices - live coding, sticky notes, helpers, challenges, etherpads - that make Carpentries’ workshops the success that they are.

I gave a talk recently for the Australian National Data Service on ’teaching the Carpentries way’. Originally I planned to cover six reasons why our workshops are effective, but ended up covering thirteen, with the thirteenth being the Carpentries’ Code of Conduct.

A Week o' Carpentry

Tue, 19 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Bringing the Carpentries to the Federal Reserve Board staff

I ran Technical Training for the Federal Reserve Board for over 20 years, designing and implementing training programs tailored to the Fed’s specific needs to ensure staff had the computer skills necessary to do their jobs.

When I started bringing in the Carpentry workshops, research assistants (RAs), who come to the Board on two-year appointments to work with economists, were the intended audience, but permanent staff, notably technology analysts (TAs) and others in the research divisions who support the RAs and economists, also signed up for these workshops. The Board, and the Federal Reserve System as a whole, is definitely dealing with big data, and employs economists, technology analysts, and research assistants to turn collected and procured data into knowledge.

Our 2017 Community Service Award winner: Anelda van der Walt

Wed, 13 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are happy to honor Anelda van der Walt as our 2017 Community Service Award winner. We received seven independent nominations for Anelda this year, which is a testament to her commitment to both individual people and the broader community.

Starting from scratch, Anelda planted the tiny seed that has now become the phenomenal growth of Software and Data Carpentry in South Africa, not to mention its spread to an ever-growing list of other African countries, such as Namibia, Botswana, Ghana, Gabon, Mauritius, and Ethiopia.

Announcing the 2018 Executive Council for the Carpentries

Tue, 12 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Voting in the election for community governance of the Carpentries (Executive Council, formerly named Steering Committee or Board of Directors) closed last week. Out of the 501 members eligible for voting, 147 ballots were cast (29% turnout).

We are pleased to announce the four newly elected members of the Executive Council:

Raniere and Lex received the highest number of votes and will serve two year terms; Amy and Elizabeth will serve one year terms.

Challenges Assessing Data Science

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Assessment Network was established as a space for those working on assessment within the open source/research computing community to collaborate and share resources. During our quarterly meeting in November, we engaged one another in a conversation revolving around data science education. This meeting was organized and hosted online by Kari Jordan, and six community members attended.

First, we discussed the definitions of data scientist, data analyst, and data engineer; second, we worked in pairs on a set of questions about assessing data science education.

When Do Workshops Work?

Mon, 11 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Author: Karen R. Word

Contributors: Kari Jordan, Erin Becker, Jason Williams, Pamela Reynolds, Amy Hodge, Maxim Belkin, Ben Marwick, and Tracy Teal.

“Null effects of boot camps and short-format training for PhD students in life sciences” is the provocative title of a recent article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Those of us who enthusiastically design and deliver short-format training promptly took note, then scratched our heads a bit. We waited a little for a response, wondering if one or more of the programs that participated in the study might step up to their own defense. Nothing happened. We thought about letting it go - we’ve got our own programs, with distinct goals, and our own assessment data, so maybe this broad-brush study isn’t so important. But … it keeps being raised. Someone will bring it up here and there, asking what we think about it. Whenever this paper comes up in conversation, its title certainly throws some weight around.

Call for Contributions: Geospatial and Social Sciences Lessons

Thu, 07 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Data Carpentry community has published two full workshop curricula in 2017, both targeted towards researchers in the life sciences. We had our first lesson release for our Ecology lessons in May, followed by the release of the Genomics workshop materials in November.

Data Carpentry lessons are domain-specific, and targeted towards helping researchers in particular domains gain the skills they need to conduct their research efficiently and reproducibly. We’re excited to broaden our reach to researchers outside of the life sciences starting in mid-2018 with the release of curricula for working with Geospatial and Social Sciences data.

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 November meeting

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On 16 November 2017 at 15:00 UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 November meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merger

With the merger in 2018, some Git repositories will be owned by a new GitHub organization. The Instructor Training course material has already been moved, you can now find it at http://carpentries.github.io/instructor-training/. Date for the migration will be announced in 2018. Instructions for migrating the repository can be find here.

Open Con Berlin - Impressions

Mon, 04 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Along with fellow Software Carpenters Rayna Harris and Paula Martinez, I attended OpenCon 2017 held over the weekend of 11-13 November, 2017 in Berlin. The conference was held in the Harnack Haus in Dahlem, the home of the Max Planck Society, where the friendly ghosts of Einstein, Heisenberg and other stellar scientists smiled on our endeavours to promote open access, open education and open data.

My Favorite Tool: Rasterio

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Rasterio is a Python spatial data library that has changed the way I work with large spatial datasets.

Ever struggled to do calculations with big datasets in proprietary GIS software? Re-project your results to analyze relationships with other data?

Rasterio makes manipulating gridded spatial data (rasters) simple and brings these data into the Python ecosystem.

Want to do some preliminary analysis on a low-memory machine?

North West University Mafikeng Data Carpentry workshop

Mon, 27 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry workshop, 1-3 November, 2017

Background/Introduction

Conducting the first Data Carpentry workshop by members of NWU Mafikeng campus and teaching my (Caroline Ajilogba) first workshop was a great task with support from NWU and our mentor, Anelda van der Walt. The support from the co-instructors Martin Dreyer (NWU Potchefstroom) and Amy Hodge (Stanford University), and from helper Bennett Kankuzi (NWU Mafikeng) was great. Other helpers from the R study group at Mafikeng’s NWU campus, like Olubukola Aremu and Ayansina Ayangbenro, were available to enhance the workshop.

Genomics Lesson Release

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Thanks to a Herculean effort from our Maintainers, the long-awaited Data Carpentry Genomics lessons have now been published on Zenodo! These lessons were originally developed through a hackathon in 2014, and have gone through several major rounds of revision since then. We had an Issue Bonanza in August and a Bug BBQ in September, with contributions from dozens of community members.

These contributions were critical to transforming the initial lesson drafts into a polished version, ready for teaching by any Carpentry instructor with a Genomics background. As with our previous lesson release, every contributor is an author, so thank you to all who have been involved!

Meet the Candidates

Tue, 21 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Eight nominations have come in so far for the 2018 Steering Committee of the new, merged Carpentries.

The nominees so far are:

Samantha Ahern
Martin Callaghan (UK)
Auriel Fournier (US)
Amy Hodge (US)
Lex Nederbragt (Norway)
Raniere Silva (Brazil, but currently in the UK)
Juan Steyn (South Africa)
Elizabeth Wickes (US)

There is still time to put your name forward. Nominations will close on 1 December.

16S Metagenomics Workshop based on Data Carpentry: successes and challenges

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We ran a 16S metagenomics workshop based on Data Carpentry materials at the North-West University, South Africa, from 24-27 October. A combination of lessons from Data Carpentry, as well as specific workflows for 16S data analysis, were used. We modified most of the lessons according to our main (critical) lesson’s dataset that we were using for 16S analysis. The following topics were covered: spreadsheet organization, shell, 16S analyses on HPC (using Shi7, NINJA and QIIME), R genomics and specific plots of 16S data in R. We extended the workshop to three full days to fit in all the lessons and decided on an additional half-day where attendees would have the opportunity to work on their own data. Twenty-three participants attended the whole workshop.

A Mentoring Subcommittee Co-Chair position has just opened!

Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

How would you like to work first-hand on developing our ever growing instructor pool? A Mentoring Subcommittee Co-Chair position has just opened!

The leader serving in this year-long position (December 2017- December 2018) will share duties with the co-chair of the mentoring subcommittee, with a commitment averaging 1.5 hours/week.

The expectations of the mentoring subcommittee co-chairs are to host the monthly mentoring subcommittee meetings, facilitate opportunities for building connections across our community to better serve our instructors, and to manage the weekly instructor discussion sessions hosted on this etherpad.

Apply to Become a Carpentry Maintainer

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software and Data Carpentry are currently accepting applications to join the lesson Maintainer team. Carpentry Maintainers work with the community to make sure that lessons stay up-to-date, accurate, functional and cohesive. Maintainers monitor their lesson repository, make sure that PRs and Issues are addressed in a timely manner, and participate in the lesson development cycle including lesson releases. They endeavor to be welcoming and supportive of contributions from all members of the community.

Skills Training for Librarians: Expanding Library Carpentry

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Post from the University of California Curation Center of the California Digital Library

redirect_from: /blog/library-carpentry-cdl/

In today’s data-driven, online and highly interconnected world, librarians are key to supporting diverse information needs and leading best practices to work with and manage data. For librarians to be effective in a rapidly evolving information landscape, training and professional development opportunities in both computational and data skills must be available and accessible.

Pack Your Bags for Dublin!

Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are excited to announce that the 2018 CarpentryCon will take place from 30 May - 1 June, 2018 at University College Dublin (UCD).

Yes, we are going to Ireland for the inaugural CarpentryCon!

A huge thank you to UCD for their bid - we are confident that this will be a fantastic venue.

We are also grateful to all the other community members who proposed bids to host CarpentryCon. All were compelling, and it was very hard to select one from so many fantastic options.

People's Favourite Tools

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A big thank you to everyone who has responded so far to the call for short posts about their favourite tools.

So far we have had Paula Martinez on R, Jeff Oliver sharing his love of Git and GitHub, Kellie Ottoboni talking up IPython, and Thomas Arildsen on how the Jupyter Notebook facilitates his teaching. Juliane Schneider has now weighed in on the wonders of OpenRefine.

Expect more posts as people contribute further favourites. Even if your tool has already been mentioned, we would still welcome a post about it, as your use of the tool may be different.

Pilot Survey Focus Group Update

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In April 2017, Data Carpentry began to pilot a survey that includes skills-based questions. Check out the blog post about our assessment strategy, and the work involved leading up to this effort.

The survey includes the following statement:

 Please enter a unique identifier as follows: Number of siblings (as numeric) + First two letters of the city you were 
 born in (lowercase) + First three letters of your current street (lowercase). This identifier will be confidential to 
 you and will help us pair your results with the post-assessment.

 Example: If I have 4 siblings, was born in Arlington, and live on Creekwater Street, my unique identifier would be 
 4arcre

This unique identifier is asked of respondents so that our staff can run paired analyses of the pre- and post-survey results to measure significant gains post-workshop.

My Favorite Tool is Git

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I love Git and GitHub.

I only use them for work I care about. Examples include lesson development for R workshops, my recent performance review packet, and collaborative projects on species distribution modeling. Oh, and Software Carpentry workshop websites (obviously).

Why I like Git:

The version control system and the companion remote host system (GitHub or Bitbucket or CloudForge, etc.) provide a great versioning and collaboration platform, the highlights of which have been enumerated many times over and in such depth that I won’t talk about them here.

Call for Nominations to Joint Steering Committee

Mon, 23 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

EDITED 2017-11-07: “Board of Directors” is a legal term and can’t be used for a sponsored project. Changed to “Steering Committee”

As most of you know, Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are merging into a new organization, provisionally called “The Carpentries”. This new organization will officially begin on January 1, 2018, with a hugely talented staff and dedicated community already in place.

Our long-term assessment results are in!

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website What concrete changes are people implementing in their computational research practices as a result of completing a Carpentries workshop?

Our long term survey report shows that two-day Software or Data Carpentry workshops are effective for increasing skills and confidence, and the adoption of reproducible research perspectives. We see gains in our survey measures for learners’ motivation to continue their learning, change in reproducible research behavior, and frequency of use of computational skills and tools. We find this very exciting, especially since a recent general survey of bootcamps and short-format trainings reports no measurable impact on skill development or research productivity.

Blogging for the Carpentries - We Want to Hear From You

Mon, 16 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This is an open invitation to our community members to share their knowledge.

We have a global community working in many different disciplines using a vast range of tools. On our blog, we would like to tap into that community experience and then share that hard-won knowledge.

This kind of information could help people new to a discipline, or might inspire others to try out a tool they have never used before.

Carpentries Mentorship Program - 2.0

Wed, 11 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Mentorship is an important part of the Carpentry experience. As Instructors, we both teach and mentor our Learners. We also mentor each other as Instructors, learning something new from each other every time we teach and interact with one another. The Mentoring Subcommittee offers guidance to new and continuing Instructors through weekly discussion sessions, where Instructors from the global Carpentry community gather to share their experiences and learn from each other. This is a fantastic opportunity to interact with other Carpentry Instructors from around the world.

Work Cycle Ganymede Wraps Up

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are wrapping up Cycle Ganymede. Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Archiving Pre- and Post-Workshop Survey Data

What did we do?

During the previous work cycle, Data Carpentry launched new pre- and post-workshop surveys that included skills-based questions, and the ability for respondents to provide a unique identifier to facilitate future paired analyses. We archived the old survey data for Data Carpentry and created a draft RMarkdown report and plots for all of the data. Paula Andrea Martinez helped Kari Jordan with this. Because of the way the code is structured, there was no easy way to create a RMarkdown report that includes only selected plots. Hopefully, we will find a way round this for future reports.

Round Two of the Carpentries Mentoring Program begins October 25th

Thu, 05 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website The inaugural Carpentries mentoring program was a great success, and we have used the feedback we received from both mentors and mentees to craft a new and improved mentoring experience in round two. The next round will run October 25th - January 10th.

According to round one participants, the benefits of mentoring included greater understanding of the challenges new instructors face, more clarity about why we teach what we teach, getting timely responses to questions, and community engagement.

Trainer Training Announcement

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

As the Carpentry community continues to grow, our instructor training is increasingly in demand! In September, we welcomed 13 new Instructor Trainers who will help us to meet that need. We are now accepting applications for the next group of new Trainers. In this round, we welcome all applicants, but are particularly keen to recruit trainers who can work in Latin America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand. We would also like to recruit new Trainers who are fluent in Spanish.

Invitación a Participar / Invitation to Participate

Mon, 25 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Invitación a participar

Las Carpentries, el Nodo Nacional de Bioinformática México (NNB), y la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática (SoIBio) les invitan a participar en el proyecto Carpentry para América Latina.

Las Carpentries han generado material para enseñar a investigadores y estudiantes, las habilidades computacionales necesarias para realizar su trabajo de manera eficiente. Actualmente, las carpentries cuentan con más de una docena de lecciones creadas con técnicas de pedagogía actual. Estas lecciones se han promovido en talleres en más de 37 países. Carpentry para América Latina tiene la intención de promover este movimiento con la comunidad hispana.

The Carpentries' In-Person Staff Meeting

Thu, 21 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Software and Data Carpentry staff teams met for a two-day in-person meeting on 12-13 September in Davis, California. This was a very productive meeting - more on this below - and it also provided some staff the opportunity to meet others face-to-face for the first time. The team is geographically scattered with staff in the US, Australia and New Zealand. At the meeting, we welcomed new Workshop Administrator SherAaron Hurt, Business Administrator Elizabeth Williams, and Deputy Director of Instructor Training Karen Word (all part-timers) to what will be a merged staff team from 2018, when the planned merger of the two Carpentries will be complete.

Introducing Elizabeth Williams and Karen Word

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

At our recent in-person staff meeting in Davis, California, we introduced three new members to the team, SherAaron Hurt, Elizabeth Williams and Karen Word. All will be working with the Carpentries part-time.

Elizabeth has joined Software and Data Carpentry in a part time role as Business Administrator to assist with onboarding and supporting Member organizations and general business and financial operations.

Here’s what Elizabeth has to say about herself:

Request for Comment: Share your thoughts on the future of The Carpentries

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are now requesting comments on plans related to The Carpentries!

A blog post last week provided history and some context behind the planning still in progress for the eventual merger of Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry into a unified organization, tentatively called The Carpentries. An outline of the planned structure, roles, and responsibilities of The Carpentries is now available, and we request your feedback through a series of Requests for Comment and related GitHub issues by October 6, 2017.

Request for Comment: Share your thoughts on the future of The Carpentries

Tue, 19 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are now requesting comments on plans related to The Carpentries!

Genomics Bug BBQ

Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Bug BBQ starting today, Monday, September 18th!

Be a part of the Genomics Data Carpentry lesson release! We held an Issue Bonanza last month to identify everything from typos to updates in code blocks and had some discussions on broader re-organization. Our next step is to go through and resolve those issues and determine ordering of the lessons.

To help us get over the finish line we’re having a Bug BBQ September 18th - 19th (whatever this is in your time zone!) to squash as many of these bugs as we can, and continue discussions. The Bug BBQ is also an opportunity for you to engage with our world-wide community. For more info about the event, read-on and visit our Bug BBQ Etherpad.

Dyslexia and Coding

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Hello,

I am dyslexic! :-)

Dyslexia is a polymorphic condition that affects more than just reading and writing. It is thought to be caused by poor short term memory, where short term memory is about equal to the length of time it takes to turn a key in a lock. A common analogy is that the CPU is good but the buffering on I/O is not good enough to keep up with the CPU. For example, it would be like having a keyboard or scanner with a buffering system that mixed up input or output and sometimes lost characters. This would also make it difficult to rapidly change from reading to writing and explains why doing things like reading, writing, listening, speaking and transcribing at the same time are more difficult for a dyslexic than for a non-dyslexic. I think this can make Software Carpentry a difficult way for a dyslexic to learn how to write programs, as it requires multi-tasking a variety of activities that are separately quite hard for a dyslexic. The rapid switching between them makes this worse.

New Staff Member

Wed, 13 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We are delighted to announce that SherAaron Hurt has accepted the job of Workshop Administrator with the Carpentries. SherAaron is joining our team of workshop coordinators who manage workshop logistics, communicate with hosts and instructors, and respond to general workshop inquiries.

SherAaron lives in Detroit, Michigan, USA. She has been very active in the National Society of Black Engineers, and has a strong background in logistics, marketing, and training and managing both staff and volunteers. Not only has she planned and run events both large and small, but she has a Masters in hospitality management to back up her experience. She is passionate about Software and Data Carpentry’s mission of teaching foundational computational and data skills to researchers, and is keen to help ‘lighten the load’ for instructors and workshop hosts.

Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee 2017 September meeting

Tue, 12 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

On 5 September 2017 at 14:00UTC+0, the Lesson Infrastructure Subcommittee had their 2017 September meeting. This post will cover the topics discussed and their resolutions.

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry merge

With the upcoming merge, this subcommittee needs to start thinking about streamlining the thinking process and disconnect from the organisations that maintain the lessons. The responsibilities for this subcommittee will stay unchanged:

Introducing SherAaron Hurt

Mon, 11 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The First Ever Data Carpentry in Ethiopia

Sun, 10 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The Ethiopian Education and Research Network (EthERNet) from the Ministry of Education in collaboration with the German International Cooperation (GIZ) Sustainable Training and Education Programme (STEP), the Education Strategy Center (ESC) and Talarify organised its first ever Data Carpentry workshop for young academics and researchers in Ethiopia. The workshop was conducted over two and a half days from 14-16 August 2017 at Addis Ababa Institute of Technology (AAiT). The main aim was to increase data literacy for researchers and establish a community of good research data practice in Ethiopia in order to increase the presence of Ethiopian researchers in the global research community. Note: UNESCO Statistics Institute reveals that in 2016 1.1% of the global research community are researchers coming from Sub-Saharan Africa. On average 30.4% from all Sub-Saharan researchers are females, whereas Ethiopia counts 13.3 % female researchers out of all Ethiopian researchers.

Joint future for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are sister organizations focused on teaching computational best practices to scientists. They are currently independent organizations with their own fiscal sponsorship, Steering Committees, governance model, and bank accounts. However, as is perhaps no surprise the organizations’ operations have evolved to share memberships, infrastructure for workshop coordination, an instructor training program, and even some staff members. This ‘separate but collaborative’ organizational structure has allowed us to build a shared community of instructors with more than 1000 certified instructors and 47 current Member Organizations around the world.

Joint future for Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

New Trainers On Board

Fri, 01 Sep 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software and Data Carpentry now have a brand-new batch of Trainers. The new Trainers completed their training this week and will start to train new Instructors soon. Adding this new cohort takes us up to 40 in Trainer numbers.

For those not familiar with our terminology, Trainers are the people who train other people to be Data and Software Carpentry Instructors. This is done through a two-day instructor training course that may be delivered in person or remotely. Trainers are vital to increasing our Instructor numbers, and thus to building our community worldwide.

Genomics Issue Bonanza Starts Soon!

Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Only a few more hours until the Genomics Issue Bonanza! Join the community in a hacky-day dedicated to creating issues and simple PRs for cleaning up the Genomics lessons. You don’t need to be an expert in the materials - we need people to help search for broken links and typos too!

Click here to see the event start in your local time.

Upcoming Publication of Genomics Materials

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

There’s been a lot of exciting work on the Genomics workshop materials over the past several months. A massive reorganization of the materials is underway, splitting the workshop into two separate tracks - one including R and the other including a variant-calling workflow. A host of folks have volunteered to serve as Maintainers for the revamped lessons, and others have joined a Curriculum Advisory Committee to provide high-level guidance on the workshop as a whole.

Motions approved for Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Merger

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

I am happy to announce that the Steering Committees of both Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry have approved 4 motions regarding the structure and leadership of the mergered Carpentries organization. The approved motions are:

Motion 1

The Board of Directors for the combined organization will be composed of 9 members, each serving a two year term without limits on the number of terms. Five members will be appointed through a process of nomination to the board followed by voting by board members. The other four members will be elected by the membership of the organization.

Motions approved for Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Merger

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Motion 1

Reflections on Assessment

Mon, 07 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website As I approach my one-year anniversary on staff with Data Carpentry, I’m reflecting on what we’ve accomplished this year. I came into this role with no data science experience whatsoever: self-efficacy had been the focus of my doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral work. That background knowledge made for an exciting time exploring our workshop survey data and letting the community know what our learners think about our workshops.

Work Cycle Phobos Wraps Up

Thu, 03 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up Cycle Phobos. Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Communication around Assessment

What did we do? Data Carpentry launched new pre- and post-workshop surveys. These surveys include skills-based questions and the ability for respondents to provide a unique identifier so that we can run paired analyses. We are in the process of phasing out the old surveys, and the new surveys have been added to Data Carpentry’s workshop template. An R-Markdown report of our old pre- and post-survey data was drafted during this work cycle. During the next work cycle, the report will be completed and the data archived for our website.

The Data Carpentry journey to University of Venda, South Africa

Wed, 02 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My name is Ivo Arrey and I am a graduate student at the University of Venda, South Africa. I first encountered a Carpentry-style workshop in 2015 when I was still part of the South African Earth Observation Network and its Graduate Student Network (SAEON-GSN) committee that organised the annual Indibano. Like it has been the culture of previous meetings, we usually set aside a slot for a workshop that teaches a new skill to delegates. I had my first encounter to a new way of automating repetitive tasks using Git and Unix Shell which was a mouth-watering experience and later R for new methods of data analysis to explore. Then came the opportunity to attend the instructor training with Software and Data Carpentry in North-West University, Potchefstroom campus which I immediately knew was the best way to consolidate my hands-on for these new skills which I had begun to grapple with for some time now.

Bringing Data Carpentry to Florida State University

Mon, 31 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My name is Rachel Smart and I’m a graduate assistant for Digital Research and Scholarship (DRS) at FSU. I was adopted by DRS in mid-March when the Goldstein Library was reamed of its collection. It was devastating for the 2% of the campus who knew of its existence. Bitterness aside, I’m very grateful for the opportunity I’ve been given by the DRS staff who warmly welcomed me to their basement layer; here I’m being swiftly enthralled by the Open Access battle cry. The collaborative atmosphere and constant stream of projects never fails to hold my interest. Which leads me to Data Carpentry …

Bug BBQ to Update Instructor Training Materials

Thu, 27 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A new version of the Carpentry Instructor Training curriculum is scheduled to be published on 10 August.

To prepare for this release, we ran an Issue Bonanza on 13-14 July to identify bugs and issues such as typos and broken links. Now that these issues have been organised into a plan of work, we plan to resolve them with a Bug BBQ on 3-4 August. Help make sure the final product is polished and complete by getting involved.

Help Update the Instructor Training Materials

Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentry Instructor Training curriculum helps prepare new instructors to teach Carpentry workshops. It also impacts instructors’ teaching practices when they teach in other contexts, helping to spread the Carpentry pedagogical model and evidence-based teaching practices around the world!

We last published this curriculum in February. Since then, we’ve taught over 150 new instructors at a dozen training events. We’ve also welcomed ten new Instructor Trainers to our community, with fifteen more to join in September. We’ve learned a lot over the past six months and want to incorporate what we’ve learned before our next publication (scheduled for August 10th). Please join the Trainer community in updating these lessons!

Meet the Folks

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Conferences can be lonely places, especially for first-timers who don’t yet have solid networks in place. The bigger the event, the worse the problem. With so many people milling around, how do you find like-minded people, much less start a conversation?

The issue can be compounded if you’re in a minority. When you’re from an under-represented group, conferences can seem even more intimidating.

The Magic of Minute Cards

Thu, 29 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

They only take a minute (hence the name: minute cards), but their benefits last a lot longer. During instructor training workshops, we use minute cards to get feedback from learners. They provide formative assessment for the instructors since the cards tell instructors what they are doing well (or not so well) so class teaching can be adjusted accordingly.

Minute cards can alert instructors to questions and misconceptions that have arisen. They are also useful post-workshop to help instructors reflect on how they teach, and what improvements they might need to make in the future either to the lesson itself, or to how they teach it.

Job Posting: Workshop Administrator

Tue, 27 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

With the growth of Carpentry workshops all over the world, we are excited that Maneesha Sane is moving from Program Coordinator to Program Manager of Software and Data Carpentry. As Program Manager, she will continue to be involved in workshop coordination and instructor training and will oversee and ensure the quality and consistency of program operations. She will also work to develop processes, infrastructure and communications to consistently improve the workshop experience for instructors, hosts and learners.

Timeline for the Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Reorganization

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Jun 8 & 9, we met in-person to continue discussing how to proceed with the merger of the Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry organizations to best achieve our strategic goals and serve our communities. We are happy to report that is was a very productive meeting.

We spent most of the meeting discussing the structure of the future organizational leadership. We have drafted a number of motions that we will present to our respective steering committees for approval at our next meetings. Among the motions, we will propose that the combined Carpentries governing structure be made up of both appointed and elected members. Additionally, we propose that it is in the best interest of the organization to seed the future steering committee with bylaws, which will be enumerated, written, and approved in the coming months.

Timeline for the the Data Carpentry & Software Carpentry Reorganization

Sat, 17 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Genomics Interest

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Last month, we announced an upcoming revamp for the Data Carpentry Genomics lessons and asked you to let us know how you would like to be involved. We’ve had a tremendous amount of interest from the community, with 78 people indicating their enthusiasm for being a part of this effort.

Twenty-nine people volunteered to serve as Maintainers for the Genomics lessons. You will all be receiving an email shortly with more information about this role. Welcome to the Maintainer team!

Announcing Belinda Weaver as our Community Development Lead

Wed, 07 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re excited to announce Belinda Weaver has accepted our offer to become the Community Development Lead. Belinda will join the Carpentries staff later this month, please give her a warm and enthusiastic community welcome!

Many of you may already know of Belinda from her work all over the community as a Software Carpentry Steering Committee Member, the Mentorship Subcommittee, the Trainers Subcommittee and a champion and leader of Library Carpentry. As part of our bylaws Belinda will be stepping down from the Software Carpentry Steering Committee on Friday June 16th and the Committee will finish the 2017 term with a membership of 6. For those of you who don’t know her yet, look for her introductory blog post later today. In short, Belinda is a very active community member and a delight to work with, we’re incredibly excited to have her contributing to our community full-time very soon!

Instructor Access to Workshops

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software and Data Carpentry share a mission to spread computational and data literacy to the broader research community at a wide range of institutional types across the world. We also share core community values of openness and inclusiveness.

Recently, we learned that some of our host sites have selective criteria that limit physical access to their sites on the basis of nationality. These policies have the effect of excluding some Carpentry instructors from teaching at these sites. We recognize that often these criteria are imposed by the broader security and bureaucratic apparatus at the organization that the host operates within and are beyond the control of our contacts at those sites. Nevertheless, these policies can cause conflict with our mission and core community values.

Projects for Cycle Phobos

Mon, 05 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’ve been enjoying the added focus and sense of accomplishment we’ve gained from working in cycles. If there’s something you’re excited about for the next round, let us know! If you’d like to join (or organize) a team for one of the next few cycles, let us know! Please post an issue on our conversations repo or email ebecker@carpentries.org.

Our third cycle - Cycle Phobos (May 29th through July 21st)

Our third cycle started this week and goes through July 21st. We focused on planning this first week. Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in this cycle.

Apply to Become a Carpentry Instructor Trainer!

Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentry community is growing! This month we welcomed ten new Instructor Trainers to our community. Now we are looking for the next group of new Trainers.

Carpentry Instructor Trainers run instructor training workshops, lead online teaching demonstrations, and engage with the Trainer community about how best to train new instructors. Trainers are also actively involved in developing and maintaining the instructor training curriculum. We meet regularly to discuss our teaching experiences and stay up to date on policies, procedures, and changes to our curriculum.

Cycle Deimos wrapup

Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up Cycle Deimos! Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Assessing Our Impact on Learners

What did we do? Data and Software Carpentry launched a long-term assessment survey in March 2017. The goal of this survey is to hear from our learners about what has transpired in their work and career since completing a Carpentry workshop. More information about this survey and our assessment efforts in general is located on the Assessment pages of both the Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry websites. The results show that a majority of respondents gained confidence in working with data (65%) and in using the tools we teach (77%), and also improved their coding practices (70%) as a result of completing a Carpentry workshop. Most of our respondents (86%) were also motivated to continue learning after the workshop, demonstrating our continued impact on learners.

Data Carpentry Genomics comes to the Netherlands

Thu, 04 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Twenty-five life science researchers from across the Netherlands and Germany joined the event on March 22nd and 23rd in Science Park Amsterdam. The workshop covered multiple aspects of working with genomics data.

Lex Nederbragt from the University of Oslo, kicked off the event with an introduction to the core dataset. The rest the first day focused on working with R in RStudio environment to explore, clean and visualise metadata in a tabular format, presented by Mateusz Kuzak from the Netherlands eScience Center and has been wrapped up by Anita Schurch from UMC Utrecht introducing the Unix shell and file system navigation.

Call for Contributions: Moving Ahead with Genomics Data Carpentry

Wed, 03 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Way back in March of 2015, a group of 27 Carpentry community members gathered at Cold Spring Harbor for the first Data Carpentry Hackathon on a set of lessons and assessments for Genomics Data Carpentry. From the beginning, we wanted these lessons to be driven by, and useful to the large community of biologists who are (or will be) working with large genomics dataset datasets; perhaps as many as 90% of biologists.

First Data Carpentry Lesson Publication

Tue, 02 May 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry has published its first set of lessons on Zenodo! The path to get here has included hundreds of people who contributed to these lessons, taught them, used them and learned from them. All the feedback, perspectives and contributions have gone back into the lessons to make them better and keep them updated and relevant. With the Issue Bonanza and the Bug BBQ, the community became the reviewers and editors of these lessons before publication. True peer review!

Instructor Training in Puerto Rico

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On March 24-25, Rayna Harris, Sue McClatchy, and Tracy Teal co-taught an instructor training workshop at the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). This was a very special workshop in many ways, and we are excited to share some of the highlights with you.

Also, be sure to check out an accompanying blog post by Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga about the combined Replicathon and Instructor Training events.

Instructor Training in Puerto Rico

Mon, 24 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Also, be sure to check out an accompanying blog post by Humberto Ortiz Zuazaga about the combined Replicathon and Instructor Training events.

Bug BBQ squashes bugs!

Fri, 14 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In preparation for Data Carpentry’s first lesson release, we hosted a Bug BBQ last week to resolve outstanding issues and issues identified during the Issue Bonanza.

The Bug BBQ and Issue Bonanza were a great success with 40 contributors in 8 countries holding lively discussions in the gitter chat room and submitting over 75 pull requests!

Throughout the event, the lesson maintainers commented on issues and pull requests, merged PRs and resolved merge conflicts. Francois Michonneau created a milestone in the R lesson with relevant issues for the BugBBQ, which will be a great model for future events. A huge thank you to all of our lesson maintainers who constantly demonstrate their commitment to keeping Carpentry lessons amazing!

Data Carpentry supports I4OC

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our increasing capacity to collect data is changing how we can look at the world. This data we’re collecting has the most promise when it is accessible to all researchers, for all types of inquiry and wherever people do work and ask questions. Open data not only increases the potential for discovery, but also adds to the research’s impact, resulting in more citations and attention to the work. It is also a fundamental element of reproducible research, allowing others to better understand the research and build on the work that has been done.

Be a part of Data Carpentry’s first lesson release!

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Bug BBQ starting tomorrow, Thursday, April 6, 2017 at 22:00 UTC

Be a part of Data Carpentry’s first lesson release! Data Carpentry is aiming to release its Ecology lessons on April 21st. We held an Issue Bonanza last month to identify everything from typos to updates in code blocks. This was a great success, with over 130 issues generated by 17 members of our community! Our next step is to go through and resolve those issues and finalize the Ecology lessons for release.

Projects for Cycle Deimos

Wed, 29 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our second cycle - Cycle Deimos (March 27th - May 19th)

Our second cycle starts this week and goes through the middle of May. Here’s what we’re hoping to accomplish in this cycle.

Long-Term Assessment Strategy

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website A fair amount of discussion around assessment took place during the Software and Data Carpentry Instructor and Helper Retreat. One of the recommendations that came out of this retreat was to include skills-based questions in our pre- and post-workshop surveys to improve the accuracy of our survey results. We know that our learners come to our workshops having varying knowledge levels for programming. A way that we can capture this information, and determine whether our workshops make a difference in learner’s ability to work with data, is to add skills-based questions to our surveys. With the help of our community, we have done just that.

Our first work cycle, Prometheus

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re wrapping up our first work cycle! Here’s what we accomplished over the past six weeks and what we’re still working on. To help with any of these projects, please get in touch!

Planning for Data Carpentry Ecology Lessons Release

What did we do? This cycle we started the process for Data Carpentry’s first lesson release - for our Ecology lessons. During the Issue Bonanza 3/16-3/17, fifteen energetic members of our community and staff submitted a total of 134 issues focused on items related to our lesson release checklist. Data Carpentry staff and maintainers will be going through these issues in preparation for our Bug BBQ (4/6-4/7). Stay posted for announcements about the Bug BBQ!

Get Involved With Mentoring

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Are you a new Software or Data Carpentry instructor? Do you remember what it was like to be a new instructor? Are you interested in improving your own teaching skills? Do you want to connect with other instructors to share teaching ideas and experience?

The mentoring committee is a group of Software and Data Carpentry community members who organize initiatives to support instructors and we’re looking for new members.

Updates from the Data Carpentry Steering Committee annual in-person meeting

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Every year the Data Carpentry Steering Committee members and Executive Director meet to review the previous year and strategically plan the next one. This year’s meeting was January 31 - February 1, 2017 in Durham, North Carolina, USA.

We started with a review of the previous year, and Data Carpentry has grown in all of our areas of focus, including number of workshops, number of instructors, types of curriculum, increased output of communication, assessment efforts, mentorship, partnerships, development of policies, involvement in grants, hiring of staff, and moves towards financial sustainability.

A Year to Build a Software and Data Carpentry Community at the University of Florida - The Impact of a Local Instructor Training Workshop on Building Computing Capacity

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This January was the one year anniversary of our effort to bring regular Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry workshops to the University of Florida. These workshops are aimed at helping students, staff, and faculty gain the computing skills they need to be successful in our data-driven world. The Carpentries are international organizations that provide materials, instructor certification, and organization of multi-day workshops on basic software development and data analysis tools. In January 2016 a Software Carpentry instructor training workshop held at the University of Florida Informatics Institute provided the start of our efforts. Since then, instructors trained here as well as experienced instructors already in the UF community have held four workshops, reaching 98 participants, including 70 students, 14 staff and 11 faculty. The participants received training in programming languages like R and Python, version control with Git and GitHub, SQL database queries, OpenRefine, and Excel spreadsheets.

Ecology Issue Bonanza!!!

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’re excited to announce our first lesson release! Data Carpentry is preparing to publish our Ecology workshop materials on Zenodo this Spring. Software Carpentry regularly publishes their lessons to provide stable identifiers for polished versions of the lessons. This enables referenced discussions of the lesson materials and gives contributors a verifiable product to cite on their CVs or resumes.

This lesson release will include the following repos:

Reproducible Data-Driven Discovery

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I spent the two weeks in January hanging out with some awesome scientists who are all passionate about the future of science. I was participating in two professional development events with support from Data Carpentry, and I’d like to share some of the highlights.

A Curriculum Development Hackathon for Reproducible Research using Jupyter Notebooks

On January 9–11, 2017, I attended my first hackathon at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science! The event was organized jointly by Data Carpentry and the Jupyter Notebook project. The goal of the hackathon was to develop a two-day workshop curriculum to teach reproducible research using the Jupyter Notebook. There attendees were a group of 25 scientists from the US, Canada, and the UK with diverse backgrounds with a unique set of skills and expertise. I was one of a handful of attendees that uses R Markdown more than iPython or Jupyter Notebooks; however, after seeing the notebook’s power and utility, I’m really excited about adding this to my reproducible workflow.

Run a workshop this Spring!

Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Did you know that 95% of Data Carpentry learners are first-timers? As a community we’ve impacted hundreds of learners around the globe, and 93% of our learners told us that their level of data management and analysis skills were higher because of our workshops!

We’re doing very well as a community, so let’s keep up the good work. We want to encourage you to either request a workshop, or run a Self-Organised workshop this Spring (March-May).

Carpentries Career Pathways Panel - Marianne Corvellec, Bernhard Konrad, Aleksandra Pawlik

Wed, 22 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Wednesday, Mar 1, 3pm PST / 6pm EST / 11pm UTC / 9am AEST (next day)

On Wednesday, March 1, the Carpentries will host the second of three Career Pathway Panels, where members of the Carpentry communities can hear from three individuals in careers that leverage teaching experience and Carpentry skills. (Note: The date of this second panel was shifted from the originally-proposed date of Feb 22 due to scheduling considerations.)

Job Opportunity: Community Development Lead

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry are hiring a Community Development Lead!

We are excited to announce a position as a full-time staff member to lead community development activities! Software and Data Carpentry have an active global community of researchers, volunteers, learners and member organizations. This person will cultivate and grow this community, developing communication strategies and opportunities for the community to connect with and support each other. You will become an active member of our team of staff and will work with people around the world to advance our mission of building a community teaching digital research skills to make research more productive and reproducible.

How we’re getting things done

Thu, 16 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Adopting work cycles

The Data and Software Carpentry staff have been working together to make progress on projects that are important for our community. To help us do this, we’re trying out a new work process based on BaseCamp’s six week work cycle. You can read their blog post if you’re interested in the details of how structuring a work cycle works. We’re picking a small handful of projects to focus on for each six week cycle, with each staff member working on one or two projects. For each project, we’re setting realistic goals we know we can accomplish before the end of the cycle and holding ourselves accountable to meeting those goals. We’re spending the first two weeks of the cycle planning those goals, dividing up the work into teams, and setting timelines to make sure we stay on track. We envision this workflow having some specific advantages, including:

Transfer of Learning

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Have you ever experienced déja vu? It’s when you have the feeling that what you’re currently experiencing has already happened. It can be extremely awkward, right? It’s a sensation that leaves you saying to yourself, “I did this already. This happened.” So, what do you do? Do you carry out the scenario as you remember it happening, or change it up? What about your perceived past experience makes you perform differently in the current experience?

Standing for Inclusivity: a Foundation for Our Teaching and Community

Thu, 02 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our goal as Software and Data Carpentry is to build a community teaching digital research skills. We teach essential computing skills to thousands of researchers in academia and industry each year. As an international organization we rely on the volunteer efforts of hundreds of researchers and professionals from around the world. Our volunteers come from diverse backgrounds, countries of origin, and beliefs. These individuals generously donate their time with the goal of helping to speed the discovery of new knowledge and the creation of new technology.

Moving Forward

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website
As of January 30th, Greg Wilson has stepped down from his role as Director of Instructor Training to start a new position as Shopify’s Computer Sciences Education Lead.

Instructor training will continue under the guidance of Erin Becker, Data Carpentry’s Associate Director and Maneesha Sane, Data and Software Carpentry’s Program Coordinator. Erin has a strong background for this role from her postdoc at University of California, Davis studying the effectiveness of training methods for transforming instructional practices. She has been involved with the Carpentry community as an instructor trainer, a member of the Mentorship Subcommittee, and leader of the effort to form an instructor mentoring program.

Best recipe - just add statistics and science

Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’d like to talk about our experiences working together as a domain scientist and a statistician and encourage you do this too!

When we say working together, we mean that we collaborate in the best sense – we each bring our strengths and those strengths are complementary. We have some suggestions for you as you get started. First, the domain scientist should look at how statistics is organized at their institution. Does your university have consulting statisticians or research-active faculty or both? Consulting can also be done as part of statistics students’ training. Most larger universities have both consulting and research. Some scientific questions naturally flow into research on new statistics methods and concepts, and other science questions are a better fit for an analysis method that has already been published. Talk to the consulting center first if you have one.

The Community of Carpentry Enthusiasts at the University of Wisconsin

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I am so thrilled that we have been asked to comment on our growing Software and Data Carpentry community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While I initially joined the greater Software Carpentry community as part of my ongoing role in providing local workshops (four years ago!), I must say that I’ve been happy to contribute back, well outside of my typical work week. These organizations do so much for the UW-Madison campus, as does our local community of ‘Carpentry’ enthusiasts.

The SQL Ecology Lessons

Mon, 23 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I am fond of saying that ecologists should not be afraid of big data – instead, we have to deal with small, complex, and poorly connected data. Understanding how we can stay on top of things, data-wise, is becoming more and more important. And some of the practices used to collect a small amount of data do not scale well at all when the amount of data increases, even if slightly.

Carpentries Career Pathways Panel: Raniere Silva, Geneviève Smith, Tiffany Timbers

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Tuesday, January 24, 7am PST / 10am EST / 3pm UTC / 2am AEST (next day)

On Tuesday, January 24, the Carpentries will host the first of three Career Pathway Panels, where members of the Carpentry communities can hear from three individuals in careers that leverage teaching experience and Carpentry skills.

Anyone who has taught at a Carpentry workshop in the last three months is invited to join, and should register ahead of time in order to be invited to the call. Registration is limited to 20 people per session, so please only commit if you are sure you will attend. Attendees can register for any number of these sessions. Future, monthly, panel sessions will occur on different days and at different times. Each session will last one hour and will feature a different set of panelists.

South Africa's North-West University Becomes Software and Data Carpentry’s first African Partner

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In November 2014 the first large-scale Software Carpentry event was run in South Africa [1] as part of the eResearch Africa conference [2] in Cape Town. Since then 15 more Software, Data, and/or Library Carpentry events were run by the Southern African community across many disciplines and several institutions [3, 4, 5].

Soft(ware) Skills

Thu, 19 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I think, in the end, technology and data science are about communication.

As a biologist with a physics degree, I’ve always been called on by my peers to help out with the more ‘mathy’ parts of their work. As early as my masters, my friends and collaborators would send me their data, here and there, to have a look and make suggestions for how to proceed. More often than not, I’d either send it back to them asking lots of questions, or spend hours of my own time, cleaning, manually manipulating data until it was in a form that I could query it and looks for patterns.

Announcing the CarpentryCon Proposal

Wed, 04 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

To date, we have not yet had an opportunity to bring together all the members of our communities. Enter: CarpentryCon! We are proposing a two-and-a-half day conference, tentatively held in May 2017 at the University of Michigan.

We envision an event that brings together members of the Carpentry community, including instructors, partners, advocates, and staff, together with people sharing similar interests from around the globe. We will have a “come and learn” format that is different from most conferences with session on topics such as teaching methods, curriculum development, community organization, and leadership skills. Opportunities will be provided for participants to come together informally to share stories about challenges and successes. There will be at least one session where attendees can share how they have incorporated Carpentry techniques into their own research and teaching, and/or how they have grown their local Carpentry community. The final list of sessions will be determined by the program committee in consultation with the community, balancing “who wants to learn what?” with “who’s willing to teach what?”.

Career Pathways Panel Discussions

Wed, 21 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are excited to announce an upcoming series of panel discussions designed to help our community members become informed about the variety of career paths available to computationally literate members of their fields. Panel discussions will be held virtually in the months of January, February and March (tentative dates, below) with each session featuring 3-4 senior community members in Carpentry-related professions, including: tenured faculty, communicators/consultants, research software engineers, industry scientists, etc.

How I Developed a Workflow for Success in Graduate School

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My home state of Michigan and the surrounding Great Lakes area cradles 20% of our planet’s freshwater resource and yet growing up next to these ecosystems, I knew almost nothing about their biological inner workings. Now, as a PhD student and environmental microbial ecologist, I explore the most abundant and amazing inhabitants of the lakes in my backyard: the diverse communities of tiny microbes.

Join our new Mentorship Program!

Fri, 16 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentry community is growing quickly! Over a hundred new instructors have been trained in the past two months. These new instructors join our community because they’re excited to help fellow researchers who are struggling to analyze their data and because they share our commitment to reproducibility and open access. In spite of these shared values, however, a third of our instructors never go on to teach with us.

Congratulations to Greg on his new position!

Wed, 14 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

As many of you will know by now, Greg Wilson, Director of Instructor Training for Software Carpentry (and thus indirectly also for Data Carpentry), has announced that he will step down from his position at the end of January 2017 to join Shopify as their Computer Science Education Lead. We’re very excited about this new opportunity for Greg to continue to reshape how people learn computer and data science skills, and we are enthusiastic to see where his creativity and passion about democratizing digital literacy skills take him next. Greg is also the reason we are here in the first place, and so this is an opportunity to say thank you to him.

Climate Science and the Command Line

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Climate science has a pretty high profile these days, particularly in my personal area of research, which involves quantifying the role humans have played in climate change (otherwise known as “climate attribution”). Behind the glamorous media coverage and international meetings, however, research in this field centers around the most unglamorous tool of all: the command line. From data management and workflow coordination to remotely accessing supercomputing facilities and backing up code, the command line is the most critical part of my toolbox. Let me explain…

Feedback on Communications

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Software and Data Carpentry have at their core a collaboration-driven ethos, and communication is key to that collaboration. We’re reaffirming our commitment to open and transparent communication, because we know we can do better! We want to give community members opportunities to talk to each other, staff and Steering Committees, to get updates on efforts and activities and to generate ideas and participate in discussions.

Growth Mindset

Mon, 12 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Each of us is born with a unique set of interests. Along the way we develop beliefs about our interests, and those beliefs determine whether we choose to cultivate our interests as we progress through adulthood.

For example, I think I’m a pretty “okay” singer, but I’ve always wanted to be a dynamic performer and sing in front of large audiences. Therefore, I learned to read music, joined several choruses and ensembles over the years, and frequently sing karaoke. I even auditioned for the American television series The Voice!

Discovering the data science community, becoming part of it, and expanding it

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

My path to becoming part of a data science community was happenstance. I started programming as a graduate student because I wanted to increase the spatial and temporal scales of my analyses. The scale increase was from one location for a few months to the entire coast of Western North America for many years. For larger scale analyses, I needed satellite data, which I downloaded from a data repository. I learned to use shell scripts to automatically download data because going through 5 to 10 internet links to manually download hundreds of files was tedious. The files with satellite data were large and in special file formats so I learned how to access and analyze them using R.

Instructor Training for Librarians

Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are pleased to announce that we are partnering with csv,conf (a community conference for data makers everywhere) to run an instructor training class specifically geared for people interested in Library Carpentry. The class will take place in Portland, Oregon, on May 4-5, 2017; for details, please see the full announcement.

Building Genomics Data Analysis Capacity at NWU

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The North-West University in South Africa boasts two next generation sequencing (NGS) platforms and additionally receive terabytes of NGS data annually from local and international service providers. Research projects with NGS components exist in the areas of Microbiology, Zoology, Botany, Nutrition, Agriculture, and more.

The three biggest challenges experienced by researchers and postgraduate students in terms of data analysis are as follow:

many of the students entering NGS projects have limited prior exposure to molecular techniques such as Sanger sequencing and PCR, and genetics concepts;
there is limited access to bioinformatics support and training (although there is lots of access to short interventions like 1- or 2-day workshops with no sustained follow-up);
and they are not aware of the range of research compute infrastructures which are available to them.

In September 2016, the NWU eResearch Initiative helped to establish a Genomics Hacky Hour (GHH) Study Group to support postgraduate students and researchers using NGS technologies. The original intention of the GHH was to bring researchers together to work on their current projects. However, limited shared NGS vocabulary hampered constructive communication amongst researchers and it was decided that specific topics would be discussed during the first few sessions, lead by a study group leader.

A Year in Review: Annual Moore Progress Report

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A year ago we were fortunate enough to receive a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Data-Driven Discovery initiative to support Data Carpentry to develop and deliver data skills training to researchers in the life and physical sciences. See our original proposal here. Thanks to the Moore Foundation, this support has allowed us as a community to run more workshops, develop new materials, develop infrastructure and advocate for the importance of data skills training for more effective and reproducible research.

Hand-crafted relational databases for fun and science

Mon, 05 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

I’m a microbial ecologist that is primarily interested in understanding the ecological causes and consequences of plant-microbe interactions. Like many ecologists these days, my research spans the gamut from field to lab to laptop. Often the work involves collecting some leaves from plants in the field or from plants in a greenhouse, and then culturing from those leaves the fungi that live asymptomatically within them (a.k.a. endophytic fungi). Sometimes studying these communities relies on culturing the organisms in Petri dishes, and sometimes on directly extracting the DNA or RNA from the samples and sequencing that. One of the hardest things for me has been simply keeping track of what samples came from where, when, and who did what to which samples. To give an example: Let’s say I’ve got a fungal culture growing in a Petri dish, and I want to know how many times it has been subcultured (that is, regrown from an existing culture), when those subculturing events happened, what kind of plant tissue the original progenitor culture came from, and where that plant tissue itself came from out in the field. Oh and then downstream, I also want to know something about all the other such fungi that came out of that same plant and all their metadata as well. And I want to be able to get all of that programmatically.

Making use of Data Skills

Thu, 01 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry learners and instructors come from a variety of backgrounds and research disciplines. Many of us, myself included, don’t think of ourselves as “computer people.” We’re here because, at some point in our career, we found ourselves doing repetitive and error-prone computational tasks by hand when someone looked over our shoulder and said “Why on earth are you doing it like that!?” This person may then have leaned over our keyboard, typed for a few minutes, and finished the work that would have taken us the rest of the day. At least in my case, this happened routinely, every time a certain person happened to walk past my work station, until it eventually became more work to try to justify my process (“But I only have to do this once”. I’d say) than to capitulate and try to learn the computer magic.

Collaborative Lesson Development for Semester-long Courses

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

When did you realize you belonged to the Carpentry community?

My first encounter with the Carpentry community was early in my PhD training, way back when Software Carpentry was teaching programming lessons using brilliantly narrated videos. I knew then that a basic understanding of computer programming was an important part of a strong career in science. What I didn’t expect was to get inspired by a community of scientists and teachers that promotes openness and collaboration throughout their work.

The Python ecology lessons

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Why We Teach It

In the Beginning

A lot of what are now the Python materials came out of a Data Carpentry Hackathon in 2014 when Software Carpentry was under the Mozilla Science Labs umbrella. At the time, Data Carpentry was a fledgling organization and really only had a small amount of materials on R and Excel. As you can see from the Etherpad from that hackathon, people were pretty excited about getting some of those materials translated to Python.

The R ecology lessons

Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Data Carpentry lessons are aimed at learners who have never programmed before. Learning something new, especially coding, can feel intimidating. Yet learners attending our workshops are motivated as they realize it is a skill they will eventually need to master to be able to manage and make sense of the data they are generating in their research. When learning a programming language, you eventually need to master two things: the syntax of the language (e.g., where the parentheses and the commas go), and the intricacies of the language that will make you write less code and faster code (e.g., taking advantage of the vectorized operations). The first can be learned relatively quickly, the second takes years of practice. One of the advantages of learning the basics of programming during a workshop is that we can teach learners good practices from the start, rather than having to go through the painful experiences that typically accompany self-learning experiences.

Forming a Community-Developed Code of Conduct: What we learned.

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Codes of Conduct are important because they define behavior expectations for a community and encourage positive relationships, and because of their importance, care must be taken when they are being developed. Defining the standards to which people will be held when they act as part of a community is inherently difficult. Everyone has slightly (or sometimes radically) different ideas about what counts as acceptable behavior, and most people are surprised that their idea of “acceptable” isn’t shared by all. On the other hand, some people reject the notion that any (legal) behavior should preclude them from being part of a community. In a group like the Carpentry community, with a fluid membership and a culture of co-operative, consensus based decision-making, the development of these standards must be a community process that can handle this complexity. How does this collective ‘you’ decide on behavioral rules for the community that reflect the diverse voices present? And how does this ‘you’ balance the need to provide clear boundaries without writing a comprehensive rule book?

Reproducible Research using Jupyter Notebooks: Curriculum Development Hackathon

Mon, 21 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Goal: Develop the content of a two-day Data Carpentry workshop teaching how to conduct research reproducibly using the Jupyter notebook
Location: Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS), Berkeley, CA
Dates and times: January 9 - 11, 2017; 9 am - 5 pm each day
To apply: https://goo.gl/aPO71f; deadline December 5, 2016. Successful applicants will be notified by December 12.

Synopsis

Making science more reproducible has enormous potential to accelerate research advances, including for practicing individuals. Despite this, the tools and approaches that are already available are rarely taught. To address this, we are organizing a 3-day hands-on hackathon aimed at developing, and later teaching, a short-course curriculum on using Jupyter notebooks for reproducible research practices. The event will be held January 9 - 11, 2016, in Berkeley, CA, at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science (BIDS). We aim to assemble a diverse and interdisciplinary group of participants, and invite those interested to apply by December 5, 2016, at https://goo.gl/aPO71f.

Open Instructor Training

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

After workshops and conferences, we frequently get questions from people who are interested in teaching with the Carpentries. We’re overjoyed by this interest and excited to bring more committed and enthusiastic instructors into our community. Unfortunately, until recently, we haven’t had the resources to open up our instructor training program, and have been holding training events primarily with Partnering institutions.

In response to this sustained community interest, Data and Software Carpentry re-opened applications in July for anyone interested in instructor training, regardless of affiliation. This two-day intensive training covers aspects of pedagogy critical for teaching our target audience, including creating useful formative assessments, motivating learners, dealing with cognitive load, and understanding how subject-matter expertise is developed. We also teach signature Carpentry instructional practices, including live coding and the use of sticky notes to track learner progress.

Belonging: Developing a Community of Practice among Data Carpentry Learners

Mon, 14 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Two schools of thought regarding learning and how it is achieved are the acquisition metaphor and the participation metaphor.

The acquisition metaphor asserts knowledge is acquired individually, applied, and transferred.

The participation metaphor asserts knowledge is formed by becoming a member of a community of practice.

The computational scientist of old personifies the acquisition metaphor. She is someone who learned and worked in isolation, spending hours upon hours coding and debugging until her problem was solved.

Analysis of Data Carpentry Workshop Impact

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website It’s funny. When I first started working for Data Carpentry, I had never heard the phrase, “reproducible research”. I can tell you now that having attended a Software Carpentry workshop, Data Carpentry workshop, and a Software/Data Carpentry instructor training, I wish I had learned the skills we teach when I first began my PhD program.

I even confessed to my colleagues that the data I left behind for up and coming grad students is so disorganized, I sent them an e-mail to apologize! This community has made a believer out of me, and for good reason: Our workshops work.

Tracy Teal on Research in Action

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The latest podcast from Research in Action features Dr. Tracy Teal, Executive Director of Data Carpentry. In 33 minutes (plus a couple of bonus clips), Tracy talks about the mission of Data Carpentry, how it came to be, and how people can get involved as learners, instructors, and lesson developers. It’s a great introduction for newcomers, and has a lot of tidbits that long-time participants will find fun and interesting as well.

Community Call on Assessment

Thu, 20 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Dr. Kari L. Jordan, Data Carpentry’s Deputy Director of Assessment, will be speaking on the Community Call on the impact our workshops have on our learners. Kari will cover the results of our post-workshop surveys including learner attitudes, learner data management and analysis skills prior to and following our workshops, and learner attitudes toward Data Carpentry instructors. Come and hear about our successes and share your thoughts. It’s going to be an informative community call!

I think I can - Self-Efficacy and the Carpentry Learner

Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Little Engine that Could had it absolutely right. Thinking you can is one of the best ways to succeed at a host of activities ranging from public speaking and bungee jumping to cooking a souffle and learning R. What the Little Engine didn’t know, however, is that this concept of “thinking I can” is actually a theory known as self-efficacy, and plays a major role in how we approach our goals.

September Carpentries Community Call

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our next Carpentries Community Call (formerly called Lab Meeting or Town Hall meeting) will be Thursday, September 15 (September 16 Aus/NZ). These meetings will now be monthly on the third Thursday of every month. It would be great to see instructors there! These calls are a great chance to connect with other Carpentry instructors and get updates and information on important and interesting topics for the community.

Responding to your Learners

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Picture for a moment one of your undergraduate university courses, or a recent meeting of your department’s research seminar. If your experience is typical, more likely than not the instructor or presenter came in with a prepared set of materials on a slide deck (or for the old-school, on projector overheads), talked at you for an hour, maybe asked if there were any questions, and then packed up and left. If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably had lots of experience with the standard lecture.

September Data Carpentry All-Stars!

Thu, 01 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

As a community-led organisation, Data Carpentry depends on our active and highly-engaged volunteer community to carry out many of our core activities. Volunteer efforts span a wide range of activities, including teaching workshops, developing and maintaining lessons, and training and mentoring new instructors, among many other efforts. Without the commitment of our volunteers, Data Carpentry would never be able to reach such a broad learner base and to make such a huge impact on our learners.

Code of Conduct and Call for Volunteers for Policy Subcommittee

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The Carpentries are proud to share a common Code of Conduct (CoC), which outlines acceptable standards of behavior for our community members and those interacting with the Carpentries at in-person events and online spaces. Historically, however, we have not had an official process for reporting potential Code of Conduct violations or for adjudication and resolution of reported incidents. Thanks to input from our community, we recognise that defining these procedures is an important step in ensuring that any such issues are dealt with transparently in order to keep our community welcoming and safe for all.

Resources for Running Workshops

Mon, 08 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A successful Data Carpentry workshop is the result of coordinated effort among many different types of participants, including instructors, helpers, hosts, learners and Data Carpentry staff. Data Carpentry offers two types of workshops - Self-Organised and Centrally-Organised. These workshop types differ in terms of instructor training requirements, fee structures, and participant responsibilities - with local hosts and instructors at Self-Organised workshops taking on administrative responsibilities normally handled by Data Carpentry staff.

Announcing our new Deputy Director of Assessment

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are very happy to announce that Dr. Kari L. Jordan will be joining us as the new Deputy Director of Assessment! Kari is coming from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, FL where her postdoctoral research was focused on understanding the factors that influence faculty adoption of evidence-based instructional practices. She is also adjunct faculty at Embry-Riddle and teaches a Graphical Communications course. Prior to her postdoc, Kari completed a PhD in STEM Education at Ohio State. Her thesis focused on strategies for improving self-efficacy and sense of belonging in first-year engineering students. She holds a BS and MS in mechanical engineering from Michigan Tech. Kari’s experiences in educational research are closely aligned with Data Carpentry’s efforts to create a welcoming and inclusive workshop environment that enhances learners’ confidence and helps them build identities as data-driven researchers. As the Deputy Director of Assessment, Kari will be focusing on assessment of workshop learning outcomes, including both skill-based and identity-based outcomes.

Data Carpentry's New Deputy Director of Assessment

Tue, 02 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Data Carpentry has just announced that Dr. Kari L. Jordan will be joining them as the Deputy Director of Assessment. Kari holds a PhD in STEM Education from Ohio State University, and has worked most recently at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where her postdoctoral research focused on understanding factors that influence faculty adoption of evidence-based instructional practices. To learn more, please see the post on the Data Carpentry website or follow Kari as @drkariljordan on Twitter.

Reopening Instructor Training

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

For the last ten months, the Software Carpentry Foundation has worked toward three goals for its instructor training program:

Make the content more relevant.
Increase the number of people able to deliver instructor training.
Find a format that meets everyone’s needs in a sustainable way.

They have made a lot of progress on all three, and are therefore now able to offer instructor training once again to people who aren’t affiliated with our partner organisations, but would like to teach Data Carpentry, Software Carpentry, or both (as the course is shared by both organisations). If you wish to apply to take part in one of the two open-enrolment classes they will offer this fall, please fill in the form at:

Survey on workshops for for-profit organizations

Mon, 25 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry’s vision is “building communities teaching universal data literacy”. All our activities are focused on working towards this vision.

One of our signature activities is running and teaching workshops. Except for two, we have so far run such workshops only for non-profit organizations - universities, non-government non-profits and government organizations. We have also been assessing the idea of running workshops for for-profit organizations. One goal would be to raise additional revenue to subsidize workshop fees at non-profit institutions and to support long-term sustainability for Data Carpentry. Another is to provide Data Carpentry training and perspectives to people conducting research in industry. We’re still evaluating this idea, and before making any long-term policy we wanted to run pilot workshops and survey the instructor community on their thoughts about workshops for for-profit organizations.

A Roadmap for Lesson Development

Tue, 19 Jul 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Our Lessons Roadmap

Development of domain-specific lessons in data literacy is part of the Data Carpentry mission. Data types, language (both computer and vocabulary), the types of questions that people ask, and underlying assumptions differ between fields and communities. Therefore when learning about data analysis, it’s easiest to translate what you’ve learned to your own research when you’re being taught from the perspective of your own domain. This means that we are committed to developing lessons in new fields, with a variety of data types and on new topics.

How to approach selecting a license for data release

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

A question recently came up on the SWC Discuss mailing list about how to select a license for publicly released data. Answering these questions without knowing the life story of the data in question can only be done in vast generalities, but there are some nearly universal issues that everyone should consider.

No person will be able to tell you definitively which license is the best. Your selection will be determined by the kind of data you are using, community standards, and your personal preference. There are pros and cons to permissive versus restrictive licenses, which you will need to evaluate using your own preferences.

Updating Library Carpentry

Mon, 06 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A global team worked to update the [Library Carpentry](https://github.com/LibraryCarpentry) curriculum and lesson material at this year’s [Mozilla Science Lab Global sprint](https://science.mozilla.org/programs/events/global-sprint-2016).

The work kicked off in Brisbane, where Clinton Roy, Natasha Simons and I worked with Carmi Cronje in Sydney to start the ball rolling. Matthias Liffers came online in Perth two hours later. At 5.30 pm our time, we handed over to teams in South Africa, the Netherlands, and the UK, led by Anelda van der Walt, Mateusz Kuzak, and James Baker respectively.

Instructor and trainee involvement

Thu, 19 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This analysis is meant to answer questions about the extent of the non-teaching instructor and the non-certified trainee issues.

Analysis and Data Files

The RMarkdown that generated this document: Completion_rates.Rmd
The data: In the Data Carpentry metrics repo the files instructor_data_5_17_16_no_ids.csv and trainee_data_5_18_16_no_ids.csv

Questions

Questions to be answered include:

What percent of fully certified instructors haven’t taught?
- Overall
- Only those > 1 year past training
What percent of one-time instructors have only taught at their home institution?

R Instructor Training

Tue, 17 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Thanks to generous sponsorship from the R Consortium, Software Carpentry is running a two-day R instructor training class in Cambridge, UK, on September 19-20, 2016. If you are active in the R and/or Software and Data Carpentry communities, and wish to take part in this training, please fill in this application form. We will select applicants, and notify everyone who applied, by June 30, 2016; those who are selected will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation. If you have any questions, please mail training@software-carpentry.org.

Welcoming our new Associate Director

Tue, 10 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce that Dr. Erin Becker has accepted the position of Associate Director for Data Carpentry! Erin did her PhD in computational genomics and her postdoc at the Center for Educational Effectiveness at UC Davis. Her postdoc focused on bringing evidence-based teaching strategies to teaching assistants, and she developed and implemented training programs, supervised and mentored instructors and assessed the effectiveness of training practices. Her computational background and experience with educational pedagogy and communities of instructors are skills and perspective she will bring to the Data Carpentry community, and we’re delighted to have her join the team!

A Welcoming Community

Mon, 09 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

The amazing Software and Data Carpentry community of instructors and learners is the foundation of our organizations. We have more than 500 instructors from 30 countries and have had over 20,000 learners in our workshops.

Software and Data Carpentry are community driven organizations. We value the involvement of everyone in this community - learners, instructors, hosts, developers, steering committee members, and staff. We are committed to creating a friendly and respectful place for learning, teaching and contributing. All participants in Software and Data Carpentry events or communications are expected to show respect and courtesy to others.

Announcing Partnerships

Mon, 02 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We’ve been hearing of the interest of organizations to build local capacity for training and to be able run both Data and Software Carpentry workshops. We are excited to announce that Data Carpentry and Software Carpentry are now offering joint partnerships! These partnerships will give member organizations the benefits of running workshops from either the Software Carpentry or Data Carpentry community. At the Silver and above tiers there will also be instructor training and capacity building services provided.

Buy This Book and Support Data Carpentry

Fri, 29 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thanks to the efforts of Len Epp at Leanpub and Tracy Teal at Data Carpentry, 50% of the royalties from the book *[How to Be a Modern Scientist](https://leanpub.com/modernscientist/)* will be donated to Data Carpentry. The book is pay what you want with a suggested price of $10. I am very excited to help support the efforts of Data Carpentry since I believe data science education is a fundamental need in the modern scientific era.

About the book: The face of academia is changing. It is no longer sufficient to just publish or perish; we are now in an era where Twitter, Github, Figshare, and Alt Metrics are regular parts of the scientific workflow. Here I give high level advice about which tools to use, how to use them, and what to look out for. This book is appropriate for scientists at all levels who want to stay on top of the current technological developments affecting modern scientific careers. The book is based in part on the author’s popular guides including guides for

Hiring a Deputy Director of Assessment

Thu, 28 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website Data Carpentry is hiring!

Data Carpentry seeks to hire a full-time staff member to direct its assessment activities. This person will design, implement, monitor, analyse, and report on a comprehensive system of metrics to help the Data Carpentry project and its sibling organization, Software Carpentry, evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the training they offer, to both learners and instructors.

As the Deputy Director of Assessment, you will have primary responsibility for developing methods and standards for the evaluation of all aspects of Data Carpentry’s training including relevance of curriculum, learning experience, long-term adoption of tools and skills and impact on productivity and reproducibility. You will also work with the Software Carpentry Foundation to build evaluation of the instructor development program, including effectiveness of instructor training and mentorship and the longer term impacts of instructor training on career development for instructors. You will also have the opportunity to collaborate with the training coordinators from related organizations to coordinate strategies and initiatives.

Data Carpentry is Hiring a Deputy Director of Assessment

Sun, 24 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

[Data Carpentry is hiring](http://www.datacarpentry.org/jobs/)!

Hello, Spatio-temporal Data Carpentry

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Data Carpentry have just announced the availability of an introductory lesson on working with geospatial data developed in conjunction with NEON (the National Ecological Observatory Network). For details, please see the full announcement on Data Carpentry’s blog.

Hello, Spatio-temporal Data Carpentry

Mon, 28 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

By: Leah Wasser
NEON Supervising Scientist, Education & Public Engagement
@leahawasser

I am sitting here in my hotel room in Oslo, Norway, floating on a high from the past few days of Carpentry workshops. We taught the NEON / Data Carpentry spatio-temporal Carpentry lessons for the first time this week at the University of Oslo in Norway. These lessons are the result of unique a collaboration between the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) and Data Carpentry. I thought I’d take some time to share my experiences with creating and teaching the lessons, while letting the community know that this great new resource is available for both workshops and self-paced learning!

Software and Data Carpentry Instructor Training Comes to Africa

Fri, 18 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Anelda van der Walt

North-West University eResearch, UCT eResearch, and Talarify are excited to announce that a Software & Data Carpentry Instructor Training event will take place in Potchefstroom, North-West Province, South Africa from 17 - 20 April 2016.

The lead trainer will be Aleksandra Pawlik, a Data Carpentry Steering Committee member. She will be joined by several of the more experienced South African instructors who provide additional support working with the trainee instructors.

Starting off Data Carpentry in 2016

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

In 2015 we were just starting out as an organization and ran limited workshops as we were working to scale. With many Software Carpentry instructors now certified as Data Carpentry instructors, our Program Coordinator, Maneesha Sane, coordinating workshops, a new website and an instructor database, in 2016 we’re set to do a lot more!

The website was a bit behind our 2016 activities, so we’d like to highlight some workshops that have happened already.

Data Carpentry to adopt Reproducible Research Curriculum

Wed, 16 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Karen Cranston

Part of the mission of Data Carpentry is to encourage and enable reproducible research. The core Data Carpentry curriculum teaches researchers approaches and skills that are fundamental to reproducible research, such as scripting and data management. We are also adopting a Reproducible Research curriculum that explicitly focuses on reproducible techniques and some of the next steps, including version control and data publishing. This is an update on the efforts on this curriculum so far, and we expect to have it available soon as a Data Carpentry workshop option.

Assistant Director Position with Data Carpentry

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Data Carpentry seeks a full-time Associate Director to lead the organization’s community engagement and education activities, to cultivate a healthy supportive community and provide mentorship and training to current and future instructors. The Associate Director is one of the two key roles providing leadership to Data Carpentry’s core efforts and is expected to shape the organization’s operational functioning, influence training, and contribute to strategic planning.

Data Carpentry is a not-for-profit organization developing and teaching workshops on fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its mission is to provide researchers high-quality, domain-specific training covering the full lifecycle of data-driven research. Data Carpentry lessons are intentionally domain specific, and span the life, physical, and social sciences. Data Carpentry workshops create an environment friendly to learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and are designed to empower researchers to apply the skills learned to data driven discovery in their own research.

The Associate Director position is initially funded for 2 years through a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. They will be hired and paid as a contractor of NumFOCUS, Data Carpentry’s fiscal sponsor. Review of applications will begin December 18th, 2015, and the position will remain open until filled.

Hiring an Associate Director

Mon, 30 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry is hiring! http://www.datacarpentry.org/jobs/

With the support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, we now have the opportunity to hire an Associate Director. The Associate Director is one of the two key roles providing leadership to Data Carpentry’s core efforts and is expected to shape the organization’s operational functioning, influence training, and contribute to strategic planning. The main focus of the Associate Director’s role will be in community engagement and education as well as overseeing communications.

Workshop in Brussels, 2-3 Nov 2015

Wed, 25 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Belgium has a flourishing biological research community and skills in data handling have become an essential tool for anyone conducting biodiversity science. The workshop was jointly organised by the VIB and the Botanic Garden Meise as part of a series of “Empowering Biodiversity workshops” supported by the Belgian Science Policy Office.

The thirty-five attendees of the workshop came from a wide variety of backgrounds in biology, including marine biology, bioinformatic, plant biology and ecology. They were also at many different points in their career, some were students wanting to gain experience, while others were established scientists looking to learn new tricks. Nevertheless, this diversity was not a problem for the workshop as everyone came with enthusiasm and an interest in improving their knowledge. We were instructed by Leszek Tarkowski and Frederik Coppens with support from Dima Fishman and Christof De Bo.

Collaboration with rOpenSci on training for working with open data

Thu, 19 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Congratulations to rOpenSci for their grant from the Helmsley Charitable Trust! Through this grant, Data Carpentry will be able to work with rOpenSci to develop and deliver lessons on R tools for data sharing, acquisition, retrieval, and visualization to support the use and publishing of open data.

rOpenSci aims to create tools and a community for working with and producing open data. Data Carpentry starts with data, and our goal is to enable researchers to turn data in to knowledge. This joint effort will allow us to provide training on how to work with the increasing amounts of publicly available data as well as how to effectively publish data for reproducibility and re-use. We’re excited about this opportunity and the support of rOpenSci through Helmsley for this effort!

Data Carpentry Instructor Certification
for Software Carpentry Instructors

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry has been growing over the last year, and now with the addition of Maneesha Sane as Program Coordinator, we have the chance to run even more workshops in more domains. To date, we have used some great instructors from the Software Carpentry community as teachers; what we would like to do now is put that on a more regular footing.

Data Carpentry Instructor Certification for Software Carpentry Instructors

Thu, 12 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Re-posted from the Data Carpentry blog.

We want to update the instructor records to see who’s interested and qualified to teach Data Carpentry, so we’ve created a Data Carpentry Instructor FastTrack certification. If you have already taught a Data Carpentry workshop, you’re registered as a Data Carpentry instructor and don’t need to go through the FastTrack certification process. If you are currently a Software Carpentry instructor and would like to teach core data wrangling skills to people who are new to computing, this program is for you!

Data Carpentry in Africa

Thu, 29 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

by Matt Collins at iDigBio x Data Carpentry conducted its first workshop on the African continent in September! As part of the pre-conference training week held before the Taxonomic Databases Working Group’s (TDWG) annual conference, Deb Paul, Matthew Collins, Libby Ellwood and Kevin Love put on a two day Data Carpentry workshop at the Multimedia University of Kenya. We taught the ecology lessons (spreadsheets, OpenRefine, R, but no SQL) to participants from 12 African countries. The participants were all graduate students and young researchers whose travel and participation in both the training week and the TDWG conference were paid for by the JRS Biodiversity Foundation. This was a significant investment on their part to build capacity for biodiversity informatics in Africa and we were excited to have Data Carpentry be a part of the effort.

Data Carpentry Receives Grant from the Moore Foundation

Thu, 13 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Reposted from the Data Carpentry blog.

We are extremely pleased to announce that Data Carpentry has received $750,000 in funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Grant from the Moore Foundation

Wed, 12 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are extremely pleased to announce that Data Carpentry has received $750,000 in funding from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

With more than $6.4 billion in assets, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is the ninth largest foundation in the United States. The Science Program accounts for approximately 40 percent of the foundation’s annual grant making, making the foundation one of the largest private funders of science nationwide.

Data Carpentry Workshop Fees

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

After discussion with our Steering Committee and the Software Carpentry Foundation, we have decided to increase our workshop coordination fee in order to better reflect the real cost of our staff’s time, our overheads and the value of the training. This is part of our broader efforts to make sure that Data Carpentry provides the best training possible and is sustainable long into the future.

Data Carpentry Goes to the Netherlands

Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Last week, between 22nd and 25th June, we ran a Data Carpentry hackathon and workshop at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. Both events were a part of ELIXIR Pilot Project aiming to develop Data and Software Carpentry training across the ELIXIR Nodes. The project is coordinated by ELIXIR UK and a number of other Nodes are partnering up, including ELIXIR Netherlands, ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Switzerland.

Data Carpentry Genomics and Assessment Hackathon

Wed, 28 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

If you're working or interested in genomics or assessment, we hope you'll consider applying for our upcoming Data Carpentry Genomics and Assessment hackathon. We're very excited about this event and the opportunity to develop lessons targeting genomics researchers and build assessment into the Data Carpentry curriculum. Travel support is available, so please apply to participate! It's a short application, and the deadline is this Friday, January 30th. If you have any questions about the event, please let us know.

Dates: March 23-25, 2015
Location: Cold Spring Harbor Labs, NY
Call for Participation
Application

Data Carpentry Genomics and Asssessment Hackathon

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Through the support of SESYNC, BEACON and iPlant we are holding a hackathon for the development of lessons for a Genomics Data Carpentry and to develop assessment for these lessons as well as an assessment framework for all Data Carpentry lessons.

Dates: March 23-25, 2015
Location: Cold Spring Harbor Labs, NY

Goal: Develop materials and assessment for a two day Data Carpentry workshop focusing on the skills needed to work with genomic data

Guiding Data Carpentry

Mon, 15 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Guiding Data Carpentry

We’ve been excited to see the enthusiasm of the community for Data Carpentry workshops and materials, and in the months ahead want to be able to engage all the people who are interested in participating as instructors, developers, hosts, sponsors, learners or anything else. We want to have good infrastructure and guidelines that can help make efforts the most effective.

Congratulations to Data Carpentry

Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

In case you missed the announcement last week, our sibling organization Data Carpentry has received funding from the Moore Foundation to support its activities and growth, and Dr. Tracy Teal (a long-time contributor to Software Carpentry, and one of the founders of Data Carpentry) has accepted a position as Data Carpentry's project lead. We're very excited by both developments, and are looking forward to continuing to work with them.

Moore Foundation contribution to Data Carpentry

Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

We are excited to announce that Data Carpentry has received a contribution from the Moore Foundation to support its activities and growth. Data Carpentry teaches researchers skills for working more effectively with data - skills that enable the paradigm of data-driven discovery being advanced by the Moore Foundation. With the Moore Foundation’s support, we will be able to help researchers in all domains accelerate their research.

Data Carpentry Blog

Tue, 04 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

Data Carpentry has now established a blog for announcements or posts on topics of interest for Data Carpentry enthusiasts. If you have a topic for a post or would like to guest post here, please let us know!

Learn more and contribute on GitHub.

Browser support

This should work on all browsers

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who’s been enthusiastic about Data Carpentry or contributed so far!

Our First Data Carpentry Workshop

Wed, 14 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Update: for more information on Data Carpentry, please see their web site.

On May 8 and 9, 2014, 4 instructors, 4 assistants, and 27 learners filed into the largest meeting space at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) for the inaugural Data Carpentry bootcamp. Data Carpentry is modeled on Software Carpentry, but focuses on tools and practices for more productively managing and manipulating data. The inaugural group of learners for this bootcamp was very diverse. They included graduate students, postdocs, faculty and staff, from three of the largest local research universities (Duke University, University of North Carolina, and North Carolina State University). Over 55% of the attendees were women and research areas ranged from evolutionary biology and ecology to microbial ecology, fungal phylogenomics, marine biology, and environmental engineering. One participant was even a library scientist from Duke Library.