2016-2017

Friday, August 26, 2016

Dr. J. Scott Long, "Reproducible Results and the Workflow of Data Analysis"

1-2:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Many disciplines are paying increasing attention to reproducible results. The fundamental idea is that other scientists should have access to your data and be able to obtain the same results—this is reproducibility. More generally, your results should be robust so that other scientists can confirm your findings using other data. Increasingly journals require authors to provide their data and analysis file before a paper is accepted to verify that that results. Producing reproducible results is highly dependent on your workflow for data analysis. This workflow encompasses the entire process of scientific research: Planning, documenting, and organizing your work; creating, labeling, naming, and verifying variables; performing and presenting statistical analyses; preserving your work; and ending with reproducible results. Most of the work in statistics classes focuses on estimating and interpreting models. In “real world” research projects, these activities may involve less than 10% of the total work. Professor Long’s talk is about the other 90% of the work. An efficient workflow saves time, introduces greater reliability into the steps of the analysis, and generates reproducible results.

Dr. Long is Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology and Statistics at Indiana University.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)

Friday, September 2, 2016

Dr. Regina Werum, "How Do you Write a Successful Grant Proposal? And Where Are the Funding Opportunities?"

2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Dr. Werum is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a former Program Director (Sociology) at the National Science Foundation.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)

Video (Media Collections Online)

Workshop in Methods & IT Training

Thursday, September 8, 2016

IT Training, "SAS: The Basics"

5:30-8:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

This workshop is part 1 of our SAS workshop series for Fall 2016, offered in partnership with UITS IT Training. 

SAS is a popular and powerful application that is used for data management and analysis in both industry and academia. This workshop is intended for those that are new to SAS or those who need a refresher of basic topics. Participants should have experience with Microsoft Windows file structure and basic statistical concepts. Working knowledge of Microsoft Word and EXCEL, as well as familiarity with basic programming concepts/logic, will be very helpful. Participants will learn about the SAS windowing environment, how to use the import wizard to get data into SAS, how to use DATA steps to create new variables or subset a dataset, and how to use basic PROC steps to examine data and compute descriptive statistics.

Materials available by email (SAS series flyer)

Friday, September 9, 2016

Sara Benken and Adam Mills, "Introduction to Human Subjects and KC IRB at IU"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

This workshop will provide an overview of human subjects research and submitting an application through the KC IRB system.  Representatives from IU Human Subject Office will provide a brief introduction to human subjects research, then focus the remaining time on learning how to navigate the IU IRB process.

Sara Benken is an Associate Director in the IU Human Subjects Office. Adam Mills is a Compliance Associate with the IU Human Subjects Office.

Materials on IU ScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)

Friday, September 16, 2016

JangDong Seo, "An Introduction to SAS"

2-4:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

SAS is the de facto standard in industries for data management and statistical computing. This workshop will touch the base of SAS and mostly statistical analyses, such as ANOVA, Regression, etc. The topics will include:

• General understanding of SAS

• Writing SAS programs

• Reading data from external files

• Data management

• Descriptive statistics

• Statistical analyses

• Advanced SAS programming

JangDong Seo is a Statistical Consultant/Lecturer in the Department of Statistics at Indiana University.

This workshop is part 2 of our SAS workshop series for Fall 2016, offered in partnership with UITS IT Training. If you missed part 1, "SAS: The Basics" with IT Training, the workshop will be offered again as an online session on Thursday, September 15, 1:30-4:30pm. Visit ittraining.iu.edu for more information and registration for that workshop.

Materials on IU ScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides)

Workshop in Methods & CEWiT

Friday, September 23, 2016

NaLette Brodnax, "Introduction to Python"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Python is a widely used, general purpose programming language.  This workshop will introduce the basic elements of Python that are commonly used for data cleaning, analysis, visualization, and other applications.  Participants will also learn how to set up a "development environment" for Python on their personal computer.  Computers with Python pre-loaded are also available in the SSRC on a first-come, first-served basis.  This workshop is intended for social scientists who are new to programming.  No experience is required.

NaLette Brodnax is a data scientist and fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Joint Public Policy program administered by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University.  Her research interests include data science and policy analysis.  As a graduate assistant for the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology, she is working on a number of projects intended to expose women to technology and to support women using technology in their studies and careers.

This workshop is the first in a three-part series offered in collaboration between the Workshop in Methods and the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology. Join us for Introduction to Web Scraping with Python (September 30) and Introduction to Using APIs with Python (November 11).

Materials on IU ScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, code files)

Video (Media Collections Online)

Workshop in Methods & CEWiT

Friday, September 30, 2016

NaLette Brodnax, "Introduction to Web Scraping with Python"

2-3:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Web scraping is a method of extracting and restructuring information from web pages. This workshop will introduce basic techniques for web scraping using the popular Python libraries BeautifulSoup and Requests. Participants will practice accessing websites, parsing information, and storing data in a CSV file. This workshop is intended for social scientists who are new to web scraping but have some familiarity with Python or have attended the Intro to Python workshop.

NaLette Brodnax is a data scientist and fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Joint Public Policy program administered by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University.  Her research interests include data science and policy analysis.  As a graduate assistant for the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology, she is working on a number of projects intended to expose women to technology and to support women using technology in their studies and careers.

This workshop is the second in a three-part series offered in collaboration between the Workshop in Methods and the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, code file)

Video (Media Collections Online)

Workshop in Methods & IT Training

Thursday, October 27, 2016

IT Training, "SPSS: The Basics"

5:30-8:30pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

This workshop is part 1 of our SPSS workshop series for Fall 2016, offered in partnership with UITS IT Training. 

SPSS is a powerful statistics application. This workshop, which is intended for people who already have a basic understanding of statistics, introduces SPSS for performing common basic statistical analyses. Participants will learn the basic features of SPSS and how to use it to generate t-tests, linear regression, and descriptive statistics, and to interpret results.

Friday, October 28, 2016

Stephanie Dickinson, "Your Statistical Toolbelt"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

This introductory workshop will give an overview of how to identify what types of data analysis tools to use for a project, along with basic “DIY” instructions. We will discuss the most common analysis tools for describing your data and performing significance tests (ANOVA, Regression, Correlation, Chi-square, etc), and how they should be selected based on the type of data and the type of research question you have. This is geared towards students or faculty beginning their foray into quantitative analysis of research data, or those who have been around but would like to step back and get a framework for how to navigate basic statistical methods.

Stephanie Dickinson is a Senior Statistical Consultant with the Biostatistics Consulting Center.

This workshop is part 2 of our SPSS workshop series for Fall 2016, offered in partnership with UITS IT Training. Join us for part 1, “SPSS: The Basics” with IT Training, on Thursday, October 27, 2016, 5:30-8:30pm. 

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, handout, hands-on exercise data)

Video (Media Collections Online)

Friday, November 4, 2016 date change

Kris Hodgins, "Introducing the Gallup Analytics Portal"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Gallup Analytics is a tool that puts Gallup’s best global intelligence in users' hands to help them better understand the challenges and strengths of the world around them. The web-based portal allows users to analyze data from the US and over 160 countries that are home to 98% of the world’s population. These data are nationally representative, covering urban and rural areas in each country.

Participants will learn about Gallup’s extensive polling efforts and how to effectively use the Gallup Analytics Portal to analyze economic, well-being, social and political data collected daily in the US since 2008 and annually across the globe since 2005. These databases include more than 4.5 million surveys covering over 80 metrics. This workshop is intended for social scientists looking for rich datasets that will add value to their research. Participants are encouraged to access the tool during the workshop. Visit https://libraries.indiana.edu/resources/gallup-analytics to access the portal.

Materials available via email (event flyer)

Gallup Analytics (via IU Libraries)

Workshop in Methods & CEWiT

Friday, November 11, 2016 date change

NaLette Brodnax, "Introduction to Using APIs with Python"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

An application programming interface (API) is a tool that provides access to data or services.  This workshop will introduce the use of APIs to obtain data from sources such as Survey Monkey, Twitter, or Data.gov.  While familiarity with Python and/or R is helpful, no programming experience is necessary to attend this workshop.

NaLette Brodnax is a data scientist and fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Joint Public Policy program administered by the School of Public and Environmental Affairs and the Department of Political Science at Indiana University.  Her research interests include data science and policy analysis.  As a graduate assistant for the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology, she is working on a number of projects intended to expose women to technology and to support women using technology in their studies and careers.

This workshop is the third in a three-part series offered in collaboration between the Workshop in Methods and the Center of Excellence for Women in Technology.View materials from Introduction to Python (September 23) and Introduction to Web Scraping with Python (September 30) on IUScholarWorks.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, handout)

Friday, December 2, 2016

Dr. Ann McCranie, "Introduction to Network Analysis"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Network analysis is being applied in an increasingly number of scientific fields. What is it? What kind of data do you need to do network analysis? What kind of training and tools do you need to proceed? Would your specific research question benefit from a network perspective? This workshop will introduce you to the basics of network analysis – research questions, data, methodological approaches and software tools - particularly from a social scientific perspective, but inclusive of the growing field of network science and complexity. You will leave with resources, readings, and a better idea of how your research work can be enriched with network analysis. You will also learn about the variety of networks courses, talks, and resources at IU.

Ann McCranie is the Assistant Director of Research Administration at Indiana University Network Science Institute, responsible for proposal development, educational outreach and conference and talk planning. McCranie received her PhD in Sociology from IUB, and her research is focused on networks in several domains: personal networks and health decision making, networks within organization and how they impact change, and networks between researchers in the mental health services field. McCranie has also served as the managing editor for Network Science and as summer program faculty teaching network analysis for the University of Michigan's ICPSR Summer Program since 2011. She is the co-author of Recovery in Mental Health: A Critical Sociological Account.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, resources handout)

Friday, December 9, 2016

Dr. Elizabeth Armstrong, "The Pleasures and Challenges of Collaborative Qualitative Research"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Contemporary qualitative research often involves teams of researchers collaborating on a project. Armstrong will discuss the pleasures and challenges of this style of research, drawing both on her experiences working with Indiana University sociology alum Laura Hamilton and a team of graduate and undergraduate researchers on Paying for the Party and her more recent experiences at the University of Michigan. Larger teams can collect more data and leverage the diverse social identities of researchers to gain entree to research sites and participants. Collaboration can also add rigor to data analysis, as classifications and interpretations are debated by the research team. However, collaboration introduces challenges of coordination at all stages of the process. These challenges grow with the size of the research team. In addition, the temptation to collect large volumes of data creates risks that the principal investigator may fall into the role of administrator rather than fieldworker and may lose touch with the data. Goffman argued for full immersion in the field and saw the ethnographer's embodied reactions as invaluable. This embodied knowledge can not easily inform the final product if the person who participated in the ethnographic or interview interactions is not the one doing the writing.

Elizabeth A. Armstrong is a sociologist with research interests in the areas of sexuality, gender, culture, organizations, social movements, and higher education. Professor Armstrong joined the Department of Sociology and the Organizational Studies Program at the University of Michigan in 2009. Before that, she held a faculty appointment in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Sociology at the University of California-Berkeley and a B.A. in Sociology and Computer Science from the University of Michigan.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer)

Video (Media Collections Online)

Friday, February 3, 2017

Dr. Olga Scrivner, "Interactive Visual Data Analysis with Shiny Applications: Interactive Text Mining Suite and Language Variation Suite"

1:30-3pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

The main objective is to introduce researchers to user-friendly analytical tools. ITMS and LVS are two web-based tools for visualization and quantitative analysis.  In contrast to existing software programs (e.g., SAS, SPSS, and Tableau), these two applications are built in R and require no installation or programming skills.

This hands-on workshop will provide an overview of available statistical and text-mining techniques in these tools. You will learn how to import csv, text and pdf files, create plots, and run statistical analysis, including conditional trees and random forest tests. You will also learn about natural language pre-processing techniques, such as stopwords removal and stemming. Finally, you will be able to perform topic modeling and cluster analysis.

Olga Scrivner is a Visiting Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese Department. Her research interests lie at the intersection of linguistics, text mining and data visualization.

Materials on IUScholarWorks (event flyer, presentation slides, hands-on exercise files)

Friday, February 10, 2017

Dr. Patricia Mabry, "Strategies for Strengthening Grant Proposals"

2-4pm, Social Science Research Commons Grand Hall (Woodburn Hall 200)

Dr. Patricia Mabry is the Executive Director for the IU Network Science Institute (IUNI).  Prior to joining IU in October of  2015, she spent 15 years at the National Institutes of Health. There, among other things, she established an interdisciplinary program in systems science, and served as a member of the Big Data to Knowledge Executive Committee. Because she was in the Office of the Director for the majority of her tenure at NIH, and because of the interdisciplinary focus of her program, she worked with investigators across a broad spectrum of disciplines, and has worked with most of the 27 Institutes and Centers that make up the NIH.  Through these experiences, she came to realize that there were a common core of issues that many investigators shared in common. In this presentation Dr. Mabry will share the compilation of the advice she gave in response to these issues. By attending this presentation, you will: 1) learn to decode NIH-speak, 2) learn how the NIH operates 3) learn specific strategies for strengthening your proposal, 4) hear important differences across funding agencies, 5) learn about peer review 6) learn how to fit your work into funding opportunities, and much more. Even a seasoned investigator is likely to learn something new!

Dr. Mabry is the Executive Director of the Indiana University Network Science Institute (IUNI) and is a Senior Research Scientist in the IU-Bloomington School of Public Health. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, educational offerings, methodological innovation, theoretical development, and provision of supercomputing and IT resources, IUNI nurtures 21st century network science among over 150 affiliated IU faculty. Prior to joining IU in October of 2015, Dr. Mabry had a 15-year career at the National Institutes of Health serving in the National Cancer Institute’s Tobacco Control Research Branch, the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP). At NIH Dr. Mabry established and led a systems science program in the behavioral and social sciences and served on the Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Executive Committee. She also led ODP’s portfolio analysis tool development team. Dr. Mabry launched her post-doctoral career at the Medical University of South Carolina where she divided her time between teaching behavioral aspects of medicine to medical students, delivering psychological services, and conducting research in tobacco control. She also worked in a small business developing personalized, computer-delivered, behavior change programs (e.g., smoking cessation, dietary and physical activity goal-setting and adherence). Her expertise spans obesity, tobacco control, diabetes, mood disorders, systems science, scientific rigor, and big data. Her work has been published in Science, the American Journal of Public Health, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, Nicotine & Tobacco Research, and PLoS Computational Biology. Dr. Mabry is a Fellow of the Society of Behavioral Medicine and was a 2008 recipient the Applied Systems Thinking Prize. Dr. Mabry holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Virginia.

Materials available via email (event flyer)