Is your software open or fauxpen?

  Is your software project open or “fauxpen”? Are there barriers in place preventing external developers from contributing? Barriers to commercial uptake? Barriers to understanding how the software or the project itself works? These are the kind of questions that … Continue reading

Posted in Software sustainability | Comments Off on Is your software open or fauxpen?

Data Visualisation Talks

This information is now available here.

Posted in Data visualisation, Events | 1 Comment

3-month report: September to November 2014

Highlights  As part of the DiXiT project our ER, Magdalena Turska, has been working with the TEI Consortium’s Mellon-funded TEI Simple project. Her work has involved the migration of the reference corpora into the TEI Simple tagset as well as prototyping an implementation of the … Continue reading

Posted in Reports | Comments Off on 3-month report: September to November 2014

Where do Oxford researchers manage the source code for their software?

I’ve been taking a look around lately at the various places where researchers are keeping the source code for their software. Its not an exhaustive survey by any means (though maybe we should do one of those), but it seems … Continue reading

Posted in Software sustainability | Comments Off on Where do Oxford researchers manage the source code for their software?

How to: create a bubble chart from a Google Spreadsheet using D3.js

Earlier in this series I discussed how to get data out of a Google Spreadsheet in JSON format using an API call, and how to convert the JSON data into an array. Now I’m going to talk about how to … Continue reading

Posted in Data modelling and migration | 1 Comment

How to: convert Google Spreadsheet JSON data into a simple two-dimensional array

In a previous post I explained how to extract JSON data from a Google Spreadsheet via an API call. However, when you actually get the data, the JSON isn’t really in the kind of structure you would imagine. Instead of … Continue reading

Posted in Data modelling and migration | Comments Off on How to: convert Google Spreadsheet JSON data into a simple two-dimensional array

How to: get data out of a Google spreadsheet using JSONP

Google Drive spreadsheets are a great way to collect data using their handy forms, but the visualisation tools sometimes aren’t sufficient. What if you wanted to do a visualisation using d3.js for example? Google has an API for obtaining the … Continue reading

Posted in Data modelling and migration | 10 Comments

Research at Risk: Report from the Jisc Co-Design Workshop

On the 22nd of September, I was invited to a Jisc Co-Design event on “Research at Risk”, with participants from organisations such as UCISA, RLUK, RUGIT, DCC, and of course some universities, including yours truly representing both the University of … Continue reading

Posted in News | 2 Comments

Jisc Summer of Student Innovation

This summer, Jisc ran its second Summer of Student innovation.  Via the Jisc Elevator, students can pitch their idea to improve the student experience using technology.  Successful projects receive £5000 and mentorship over the summer to develop and realise their … Continue reading

Posted in News | Comments Off on Jisc Summer of Student Innovation

Software Sustainability – Working with WWARN

Over the summer we defined several new Research Support specialisms, covering software selection, intellectual property, and software sustainability. These derive in part from our experiences in running OSS Watch, the national centre of expertise in open source software and open … Continue reading

Posted in News | Comments Off on Software Sustainability – Working with WWARN