UC’s Digital Scholarship Center presents “Digital Integrator and Transdisciplinary Research Partner”

This Association of College and Research Libraries’ (ACRL) Spring 2021 Digital Scholarship Section featured “Digital Integrator & Transdisciplinary Research Partner,” a virtual panel highlighting the University of Cincinnati’s Digital Scholarship Center’s (DSC) unique model and work with research teams focused on misinformation and missing information.

The DSC partnered with UC Libraries’ Research and Data Services Team and the Department of Journalism to research Twitter’s impact on misinformation, false information and conspiracy theories about coronavirus. Using machine learning and linguistic analysis, the team also partnered with Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to understand the role of missing information in electronic health records as it relates to social determinants of health. During the presentation, the panel discussed the unique organization of the DSC and its partnerships on campus and how health information professionals and the DSC work together on research projects involving social media, social justice and social determinants of health. The recording and slides are available online.

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Love Data Week, Feb 8-12, 2021.

Love Data Week 2021

Love Data Week 2021

Love Data Week takes place the week of Valentine’s Day. Created to raise awareness of research data management, sharing, reuse, and preservation of data, it has been promoted by library and data professionals since 2016 in both online and in-person events.  You can see some of the events taking place around the world at the International Love Data Week 2021 schedule.

One of the ways we at RDS/UCL celebrate is to participate in the Adopt a Dataset program that ICPSR hosts every year.  ICPSR choses to highlight interesting data sets from their collection for individuals to explore to learn more about data. Once a dataset is chosen, you may fill out the Dataset adoption form and have your name added to the wall of adopters.  Adopters are encouraged to delve into the data by reading about the research, look at the variables, try out the analysis tools online, and read related publications.

ICPSR is a member consortium that UC belongs to that provides access to datasets from over 15,000 studies, over 5.6 million variables, which have had over 95,000 publications that cited those studies. It also provides curated data repository services for researchers, including secure data enclaves, which fulfill finding requirements for data management plans. Although most studies are quantitative in the social and behavioral sciences, there are also themed collections in the arts, humanities, and some health sciences. Teaching resources, online analysis tools, and pre-made exercise modules also are available to members.

There are a wide variety of datasets to choose from this year, ranging from education, to social media, social justice, to health. I chose to adopt one on music, Study of Jazz Artists, 2001 (ICPSR 35593). I started out by looking at the description of the study and how it was conducted. I then jumped into browsing the variables, one of the tabs found on the data set page. One of the great features of ICPSR is that you can search by variable if you are looking for specific studies to replicate or want to see if your own survey questions fit what others have asked in the past.

One variable jumped out at me – Q32- Age Began Playing First Instrument. My own children play instruments and I always wonder if we’ve started them at the right age or not. Looking at the result for this variable, I can see the unweighted results, including summary statistics and a variables chart. The median age was 9, the mode was 10, the maximum was 35, and the minimum was 1! I guess there’s still hope if you’re in your 30s to pick up an instrument to become a professional jazz musician!   The sweet spot to start your child appears to be the 8-10 year old range.

If you have questions about Love Data Week,  ICPSR, Data, Data Management Plans, Cleaning, Storing, Finding, or Using Data, contact us at Research and Data Services here at UC Libraries. We would love to help you with your projects, offer a workshop to your department or class, or discuss your data needs.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries Annual Progress Report, 2019-2020: A Year Like No Other

annual progress report graphicWhat a year it’s been.

The University of Cincinnati Libraries Annual Progress Report, this year completely online, covers July 2019 through June 2020, an academic year that started off normally, but in the spring would be disrupted in ways never thought possible because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Fall semester was business as usual with students, faculty, researchers and staff accessing our facilities and resources for research and study, or simply to grab a cup of coffee between classes. Librarians and staff provided instruction on how to find the best research materials, offered reference assistance, collected and made our collections available and collaborated with faculty and researchers to translate information and data into knowledge. The usual activities in the library would come to a sudden halt spring semester.

This year’s report reviews how we responded to the Covid-19 pandemic, but it also celebrates our numerous accomplishments, highlights new special collections and library exhibits, spotlights the achievements of our faculty and staff and provides usage stats and financial information.

As the semester and 2020 come to a close, we wish you warm wishes for the holiday season. May the new year bring you health, harmony and joy.

Read Source, the online newsletter, to learn about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries

Read Source, the online newsletter, to learn about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries.

In this issue of Source, Dean Xuemao Wang reflects on his eight years at UC and asks questions about the future. We announce a new collaboration to manage UC’s Art Collection, as well as share the news that The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded the University of Cincinnati a $700K renewal grant to advance and expand the Digital Scholarship Center’s (DSC) “catalyst” model.

Ted Baldwin and Rebecca Olson tell of a partnership with the UC Venture Lab to boost innovation and Melissa Cox Norris writes about the New Way(s) of Work.

Remote events are featured in this issue of Source, including the recent Life of the Mind lecture with links to the video and bibliography of submitted UC faculty and staff creative and scholarly works, as well as upcoming events announced such as UC DATA Day and the Cecil Striker Webinar Series.

Read these articles, as well as past issues, on the web at http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/ and via e-mail. To receive Source via e-mail, contact melissa.norris@uc.edu to be added to the mailing list.

Digital Scholarship Center Receives Grant to Develop Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Aid in COVID-19 Research

The Digital Scholarship Center’s James Lee, PhD, and Danny Wu, PhD, MSI, Department of Biomedical Informatics, are one of 11 recipients of the College of Medicine’s Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program. An opportunity open to all UC colleges in the Academic Health Center, the program was established to rapidly support the development of innovative studies that will contribute significantly to knowledge of COVID-19 in hopes to have significant impact on treatment, diagnosis and management of the infection or its prevention. With financial support from the UC Office of Research directed by Dr. Pat Limbach, and the College of Medicine Office of Research, the Special Coronavirus (COVID-19) Research Pilot Grant Program awarded a total of $425,000 to recipients.

The Digital Scholarship Center’s proposal, “Using Intelligent Text Mining and Summarization Methods to Address COVID-19 Open Research Dataset Challenge,” received a grant totaling $25,000 to develop a text mining pipeline and web-based intelligent query system to extract and summarize relevant COVID-19 related literature. The long-term research objective of the project is to create a usable and generalizable information resource to search scientific literature and generate knowledge through human-centered AI approaches.

“We anticipate the project to have important impacts within our research group, the university and the research community as a whole,” said James Lee, associate vice provost for digital scholarship, associate dean of libraries and director of the Digital Scholarship Center. “In building the intelligent query system, a broader impact will be made in the greater research community as we will develop a tool that can take any Coronavirus related question and summarize the literature.”

The intelligent query system will be evaluated on its usability and released to all researchers at the university as a self-service tool to support their COVID-19 research projects. Therefore, the system will likely have a great impact on the research productivity at the university, especially when many COVID-19 related grants have been or will be released in the next few months. “We anticipate that the intelligent query system could be a valuable tool to help understand and defeat this novel Coronavirus,” said Lee.

The Digital Scholarship Center is a catalyst for collaborative, trans-disciplinary forms of research and teaching, bringing together humanistic methods with technical innovations. For more information, visit their website https://dsc.uc.edu/.

Read Source, the online newsletter, to learn more about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries.

source headerRead Source, the online newsletter, to learn more about the news, events, people and happenings in UC Libraries.

In this issue of Source, Dean Xuemao Wang writes about how a digital core is part of a 21st-century liberal education.

Two exhibits that highlight women who fought for equality are featured in this issue along with an article by Kevin Grace, university archivist and head of the Archives and Rare Books Library, who writes of Mark Twain’s relationship with Cincinnati, including that quote attributed to Twain about where he hopes to be when the world ends.

This issue announces the exciting comeback of the former popular Authors, Editors & Composers exhibit that will combine with the current Life of the Mind lecture to form one event that will celebrate the achievements of UC’s artists, authors, editors & composers. We announce the 5th University of Cincinnati Libraries Annual Progress Report – A Year of Reflection.

Lastly, we announce two upcoming events – the second Hidden Treasures: An Adopt-A-Book Evening on March 12 and the upcoming annual Cecil Striker Lecture to focus on Dr. Christian R. Holmes and scheduled for May 7.

Read these articles, as well as past issues, on the web at http://libapps.libraries.uc.edu/source/ and via e-mail. To receive Source via e-mail, contact melissa.norris@uc.edu to be added to the mailing list.

Three UC Libraries employees accepted to participate in RMD 102: Beyond Research Data Management for Biomedical & Health Sciences Libraries course

UC Libraries’ Rebecca Olson, Tiffany Grant and Don Jason have been accepted into the RDM 102: Beyond Research Data Management for Biomedical & Health Sciences Librarians (Spring 2020) course, offered through the National Network of Libraries of Medicine Training Office (NTO).  

The major aim of this course is to provide an introduction to the support of data science and open science with the goal of developing and implementing or enhancing data science and data literacy training and services at UC. Threaded throughout the course will be the librarian’s role in research reproducibility and research integrity and include practice in using Jupyter Notebooks. The course topics include an overview of data science and open science, data literacy, data wrangling, data visualization and data storytelling. 

Rebecca, business and social sciences informationist, Tiffany, research informationist, and Don, clinical informationist, are all members of the Research & Data Services Team and are working on forwarding the mission of the team and digital integration efforts across the Libraries. Participation in this course will afford both the opportunity to demonstrate improved skills in research data management, as well as to gain the knowledge and ability to support data science services here at UC.

 Please join us in celebrating their initiative and accomplishment!