What is a DS Data Project?

Digital scholarship data projects usually involve data visualization and/or the creation of databases for the purposes of making data more manageable, navigable, and intelligible. Depending on the tools and methods used, different types of visualizations can be achieved and queries run for asking and answering scholarly questions. (See examples.)

What Do DS Data Projects Involve?

Among other takes, data projects require planning, the acquisition of existing data or collecting of new data, data cleaning, and structuring, and, of course, analysis. (Also see, .)

Where can I get DS Data Project Support at BC?

BC Libraries' facilitates, supports, and consults on data acquisition, management, curation, and visualization as well as design and provide data-related in-class instruction and . BC's also provides support as well as for platforms like ArcGIS.

There are a variety of data visualization tools available, many of them open source, to help you explore existing data visualization or to create your own. Below are a few examples.

Excel

is a powerful tool for getting meaning out of vast amounts of data and offers a library of chart and graph types to help users visualize their spreadsheet data.

The following are examples of data-related projects that highlight. Note more complex projects, especially ones with custom platforms, are grant or institutionally funded, which enables scholars to create more robust public-facing works.

Humanities

• Divisions of the Bible - a data visualization project that uses the tool

• - a network visualization project that uses the tool .

• - a mapping project that uses the tools , , and

• Also see, for more projects

Social Sciences

• - a visualization project shows the historical immigration to the U.S. (1830 -2015)

• - A visualization project that displays fertility rate, life expectancy, and population of countries in six world regions using

• - brings technologists, government, and communities to rapidly prototype digital products—powered by federal open data—that solve real-world problems for communities across the country.

Sciences

• - an international, collaborative research program whose goal was the complete mapping and understanding of all the genes of human beings

• - a scientific collaboration of international physics institutes and research groups dedicated to the search for gravitational waves

• - a BC science project that shows how much the ground moves in Weston, Massachusetts

The following questions are helpful to consider when beginning a data project.

Data Acquisition

• Are you looking for data & statistics with a time period or geography focus?

• Are you looking for a specific data type? e.g., qualitative, qualitative, GIS, multimedia

• Are you collecting your own data for your research?

• Have you started searching for data sources?

• Do you need support on data management (DMP), preservation, or sharing?

Data Manipulation

• What data format are you using? e.g., Excel, Stata, SPSS

• What data tasks do you need to conduct?

  • Data cleaning: the process of preparing data for analysis by removing or modifying data that is incorrect, incomplete, irrelevant, duplicated, or improperly formatted.

Data Visualization

• What format does your data come in? e.g., Excel, text file, JSON, PDF, spatial

• Do you have any preferred visualization tool you want to use?

• Do you need help with choosing the visualization tools?