Software Carpentry @ Middlebury, 2019

Ryan Clement

By Ryan Clement, Data Services Librarian, Middlebury College

On January 17-18, 2019, Middlebury is hosting a Software Carpentry workshop for faculty, staff, and students. This workshop is co-sponsored by the Middlebury Library, the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Research (CTLR), the Digital Liberal Arts Initiative (DLA), and the Director of the Sciences.

The Carpentries are a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives. They teach skills that are immediately useful for researchers, using lessons and datasets that allow you to quickly apply what you have learned to your own work. I’m really excited about using the Software Carpentry curriculum here to help our faculty, staff, and students become more efficient in their research.

This workshop is discipline agnostic. The curriculum will include:

  • Shell scripting in the bash shell (using the command line)
  • Version control with git and GitHub
  • Data manipulation, analysis, and visualization with R/RStudio

The target audience is learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and the instructors will put a priority on creating a friendly environment to empower researchers and enable data-driven discovery. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to teach not only how to do analyses, but how to manage the process to make it as automated and reproducible as possible. For instance, after attending this workshop you will be able to:

  • Write a loop that applies one or more commands separately to each file in a set of files
  • Share your code and make it easy to cite
  • Read tabular data from a file into R and perform operations on it
  • Manage files and projects in RStudio
  • Use ggplot2 and R to create publication-quality graphics

Space is limited and it will likely fill quickly. This workshop is free of charge, and lunch and coffee breaks will be provided. Here is a registration link: http://go.middlebury.edu/swc2019-registration/, and the workshop webpage http://go.middlebury.edu/swc2019 for more information.

Questions? Send email to Ryan Clement, rclement@middlebury.edu.

We hope to see you at the workshop!