Funding, News and Announcements

In November, the national Humanities & Social Sciences team, on behalf of the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (Alliance) federation, will be offering two introductory workshops on data organization using spreadsheets and Regular Expressions (Regex). These workshops are intended for humanities, arts, and social sciences researchers. 

Date: Monday, November 4, 2024
Time: 12:30 pm-3:30 pm Eastern Time 
Title: Tidy data (using spreadsheet programs for data organization)
Language: English

Description: This workshop aims to teach researchers, librarians, and information professionals basic concepts, skills, and tools for working with data to get more done quickly and with less pain. In this lesson, you will learn good data entry practices, how to avoid common formatting mistakes, approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets, basic quality control and data manipulation, and exporting data from spreadsheets. This domain-specific workshop focuses on examples and challenges from Humanities, Social Sciences, and library research fields and uses librarycarpentry.org materials.

Technical requirements: have spreadsheet software installed prior to the workshop. Library Carpentry suggests LibreOffice.

Registration Link

Date: Monday, November 11, 2024
Time: 12:30 pm-3:30 pm Eastern Time
Title: Introduction to Regular Expressions (Regex)
Language: English

Description: Regular expressions are used to find “strings” in text documents. Strings are sequences of characters, and regular expressions excel at finding them. If you need to find anything beyond exact character matches with or without general case insensitivity, then it is time to consider leaving behind standard tools for finding text and embracing regular expressions. In particular, regular expressions excel at finding patterns of characters within text. It can be applied to many applications and programming languages.

Technical requirements: if you are on Windows, we recommend that you install Git for Windows (instructions here). Linux and macOS already have their own terminal.

Registration Link

These are introductory, beginner-level sessions. No prior experience or knowledge is required. The workshop leverages lessons from Library Carpentry, part of the larger Carpentries community that teaches researchers worldwide foundational coding and data science skills.

For further information, contact hss-series@gw.alliancecan.ca