Photo by A.Wilkinson / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 27/03/2019 (10am-1pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

The 4th international Love Data Week is celebrated across the world between the 11 and 15/02/2019. Free events are taking place in London and the UK, including:

• The Birkbeck Library will run many sessions, open to all; topics include: Data Management Plans, NVivo, Open data and the GDPR. See full list of events and registration.
• The University of Liverpool Library and the LJMU Library also have several events on topics such as publishing and Gale Digital Scholar Lab. See full list

And as usual, the UK Data Service will be running free webinars about data management, finding and re-using data.

More events are taking place across the world, follow #lovedata19 for updates!

What is TDM?  

There are various definitions of Text and Data Mining (TDM) which cover both the technicalities and utilities of the practice. The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) usefully define TDM as: ‘The use of automated analytical techniques to analyse text and data for patterns, trends and other useful information’. Even within TDM, there are different definitions for both text and data mining. Text mining is more commonly seen as the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from unstructured data. Data mining, on the other hand, is the computational process of discovering and extracting knowledge from structured data. There has been a surge of interest in the use of TDM in academia across all disciplines ranging from the sciences to the humanities. Yet undertaking TDM has also entailed a whole host of legal and political issues, which have nearly threatened to hinder the practice. These issues have largely centred around copyright, intellectual property rights, licenses and download limits. 

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Photo by Epic Fireworks / CC BY

This regular training course introduces PhD students to research support available during the course of their studies. It is relevant for all PhD students, whatever the stage reached in their project and is applicable to all disciplines.

The half-day session focuses on Research Integrity, Research Data Management, Data Protection, Research Ethics, Open Access and Research IT. The course highlights good practices in these areas, explains the expectations of researchers and points them to relevant UCL support services.

The next session will take place on Wednesday 30/01/2019 (2-5pm).

Booking information is available on the Doctoral Skills Development Programme website.

Oral history can be a complicated beast when it comes to issues surrounding consent and ethics. Firstly, oral history is considered both a methodology and a field of study so this inevitably complicates things for researchers. As a field of study that has developed into its current form over the past fifty years, oral history has always concerned itself with giving a voice to the powerless, the marginalised and disenfranchised in society. As the field has developed over the years, so too have questions about the practice of oral history. After all, the very foundations of oral history relies on talking and listening to our subjects in order to record and preserve their memories for future generations. Yet, the academic pursuit of oral history has also raised numerous questions about the types of histories we record and the dynamics at play between researchers and their subjects. Indeed consent and ethics have always been a central concern of oral history. But when it comes to addressing these issues, oral historians need to strongly bear in mind that they are not only abiding by the professional standards of the field but also respecting the wholly collaborative nature of the interview. This guide will aim to provide an overview of the debates concerning consent in oral history and the issues it raises in research data management for researchers at UCL and beyond.

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This guide will aim to provide some useful advice for students on finding data to re-use during their research projects.

Data Resources Online

You may want to start by using UCL Explore to search for research studies based on secondary datasets. From there, you can consult the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data.org) – a global repository of research data. It is also best kept in mind that different datasets require different permissions. If you are planning to use safeguarded or controlled access data, you will need to abide by additional conditions for accessing it. For example, this may include specific forms of citation, depositor permission to registration and authentication of the users of the data. There are plenty of online courses to help you navigate your way through the use of digital datasets. The University of Edinburgh run an online research data management training programme called MANTRA to help researchers learn how to manage their digital data. Furthermore, the UK Data Service provides a range of dataset and topic guides along with video tutorials on how to use data.

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JISC will be running a workshop on research notebook management in London on the 19^th of November. The event will cover the requirements of research notebooks, the tools needed to manage them and how this relates to researchers’ own subject specialisms.

Researchers with an interest in exploring the use and management of lab notebooks are strongly encouraged to attend.

An Eventbrite is available for any researchers who are interested in attending the session.

SES Open:  Harnessing FAIR Data Symposium

Harnessing FAIR Data (3 September 2018, 13:00 – 17:00) focuses on researchers who employ or are seeking to use data in their work. FAIR is a set of guiding principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. In this thematic context we aim to better understand the cross-disciplinary practice of sourcing, using and managing data and its associated implications, such as ownership, standards and metadata, and access and licensing. Experienced speakers from around the UK will come together to explore FAIR data and services, and a panel session will help to identify key questions that researchers face when considering using data in research.

Register online

Programme highlights:

Realising the Potential: Final Report of the Open Data Task Force. 
Prof. Pam Thomas, University of Warwick
The Re-use of Consumer Data for the Social Good
Prof. Paul Longley, Department of Geography, UCL
Using socio-ecological simulation models to make the most of hard-won paleoecological data 
Andrew Lane, Department of Geography, King’s College London
The CLOSER consortium of longitudinal studies: Opportunities and obstacles in harmonising data from diverse sources
Dr. Dara O’Neill, CLOSER, UCL Institute of Education
Publishing FAIR Data in Chemistry
Dr. Charles Romain, Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London

Panel members: Prof. Pam Thomas, Dr. Paul Ayris (UCL), Prof. Henry Rzepa (Imperial College London)

This event is hosted by QMUL, UCL eResearch Domain and the SES Consortium.

Photo by Mike Laurence / CCBY

Research Data Management (RDM) is an increasingly important skill for researchers across all disciplines and career stages. Most research funders are introducing new requirements around Data Management as part of the application process. Often researchers will be asked to produce a Data Management Plan or be required to share data at the end of a project.

This workshop will provide a practical overview of the major issues in RDM including how to meet funder requirements, how to effectively store data during your project, and making decisions about whether to share research data. As part of the workshop participants will begin to develop their Data Management Plan.

This new regular course will start in September 2018. Booking is open for the following dates, 16 January 14:00-15:30 and 13 February 14:00-15:30.

This new course is part of the support services already provided by the Library RDM team to write Data Management Plans. Online resources will remain available to understand funders’ requirements, see examples of Plans and ask for review.

The Research Data Management and Research IT teams run regular drop-in sessions. These sessions are open to all UCL research staff and research students and will be attended by someone from the Research Data Management team as well as representatives from all of the RITS service areas; if you have any questions or problems related the following areas, you should find someone there who can help:

• research programming
• workflow automation
• finding tools and services for your research programmes
• high performance computing
• handling large datasets
• handling sensitive data
• data storage
• Research Data Management (including Data Management Plans).

There’s no need to book, but we can make sure there’ll be someone there to help with your problem if you email rits@ucl.ac.uk ideally two days before the session.

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