IT Services Research Support team

Highlights

Writing home: how German immigrants found their place in the US

The Live Data project steering group are very happy with our progress and have asked us to run a larger event aimed at academics, publishers and the press where we will discuss the future of data publication and visualization. Martin Hadley also had our first research data visualization published in The Conversation – Writing home: how German immigrants found their place in the US. (The conversation team were unable to allow iframes so the visualization is a link rather than embedded as we’d hoped).

Suzy Shepherd and Adelina Tomova at work during their 2015 internship.

Martin Wynne is delivering Clarin project remaining tasks which will culminate with an event in Oxford titled “Exploring Spoken Word Data in Oral History Archives” which will draw researchers from across Europe.

James Cummings is coordinating DHOxSS 2016 with colleagues across IT services and academics in departments.

The Blender project has attracted more researchers than we planned which is helping us define how we’ll offer the service going forwards.

We’ve conducted a service review with Peggy McCready and agreed how our work fits with Research Services and the Bodleian Digital group.

Finally, some great news just in. Our 2015 summer intern Adelina Tomova has just been offered a job in New York. Adelina helped us create the OpenSpires website and led the production of the Openness at Oxford videos with Suzy Shepherd.

Progress against plans for last 3 months

Engagement statistics, December to February 2016

1. Projects:
   1. Live data: on track, the project steering group has asked us to expand scope of the SIG meetings to include Publishers and Press. We are aiming to organize a meeting
   2. Participant Data: delayed whilst James Cummings takes over from James Wilson
   3. DMT project support: delayed whilst funder reviews project plan
   4. Blender 3D: on track, event now merged with Live Data sig to expand potential audience
   5. Clarin projects: on track, project will finish end of April with an event in Oxford.
2. We’ve continued to expand our teaching, and we are finding ways to join the teaching together as a curriculum themed along the lines of ‘data science practical skills’. We are also offering to teach out in departments more often.
3. We need to do more to package up our teaching for departments and advertise via websites such as the RDO
4. RDM delivery group agreed communication plan, now we have to implement it.
5. Scott Wilson and Kris Popat have released ORDS 2 which we hope to have on Oxford servers soon. This implements APIs that return JSON. We will try to demonstrate how the Drupal DataTables module can be setup to pull data from ORDS to be displayed in an interactive table – see datatable examples here.
6. The main task we need to do soon is to contact the DCC and ask who at Oxford is using the DMP Online tool

Plans for next 3 months

1. With James Wilson leaving we will need to ensure we can take over the work he owns i.e. ORDS service management, Participant Data project and all the support requests he owns. This will be tough as we currently don’t have extra resources.
2. Continue to deliver the projects pipeline (as above) but also agree new projects for next year
3. Plan and deliver two new outreach events aimed at researchers at Oxford – the data visualization event with OUP and Social Sciences, and event organised with Learning Institute
4. Get the RDM communication plan moving and organise the next delivery group meeting focused on projects
5. Deliver the Participant Data report, and plan SIG meeting and survey
6. Write project request focused on electronic laboratory notebooks