On December 1st we were lucky to have Lynn Cherny join us as a guest speaker. Lynn’s talk, Design for Interactive Data Visualization (slides & video), started with Shneiderman’s Infovis mantra: Overview first, zoom and filter, then details-on-demand. For the remainder of her talk, she followed the outline below using a number of examples from the NYTimes: Overview &… Read More
“(11/8/2014) The Craftsman worked with speed and precision. He was architect, researcher, tester, and creator. From the translucent python coiled around his arm, he wrought the tools to build his dreams. By his own admission the quiet creature was still mostly mystery. As he worked, the anaconda’s gentle chatter aligned with the appearance of biblical… Read More
A roomful of librarians interspersed with a few technology geeks gathered at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Phillips Auditorium last weekend to hear software developer and GitHub staffer Kyle Daigle speak passionately about distributed version control through the use of Git and GitHub. Part of the DST4L course initiated by John G. Wolbach’s Head Librarian,… Read More
When I enrolled in the Fall, 2014 Data Scientist Training for Librarians (DST4L) course, I wasn’t sure how relevant the course’s content would be to my current projects. In prepping for the course’s first two sessions, which focused on OpenRefine (an open source tool for managing “messy” data), I quickly realized that here is a… Read More
“(9/22/2014) The spectacles were perpetrated by wizards of a sort. Magicians of Dada, or ta-da or someodd. As I first understood it, their power was mystical or perhaps equinoctial. All I knew was that their magic was more than illusion, and for them it was something other than magic. It could be studied, taught, and learned.… Read More
Mark your calendars: the first Data Savvy Librarians Meetup is coming up soon! Wednesday, August 27 4 pm-6 pm Phillips Auditorium, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics 60 Garden Street, Cambridge We’ll be around to help you get Python, Google Refine, etc. set up on your laptops in advance of the meetup, from 3:30-4 pm. More and… Read More
Data Scientist Training for Librarians or DST4L is an experimental course being offered by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics John G. Wolbach Library and the Harvard Library to train librarians to respond to the growing data needs of their communities. Data science techniques are becoming increasingly important to all fields of scholarship. In this hands-on… Read More
The last regularly scheduled meeting of the DST4L class on November 26th, 2013 was devoted to course feedback (the originally scheduled topic “Putting it all Together: On the Web, PDF, Reporting” was changed to account for a short holiday week and the hackathon planned in January). Chris Erdmann opened the session by reiterating the original… Read More
“(11/17/2013) Guided once more by the wise and powerful Dr. Lynn Cherny, MD (Master of Data), we first attempted to discourage cardiac fibrillation by applying Topic Modeling to Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and we then performed an exploratory Gephi Procedure on the resulting corpus. Both efforts were considered successful and the Gephi Procedure revealed that data… Read More
On November 18th, Gabriel Florit from the Boston Globe talked about data analysis and exploration and presented a wide variety of his interactive visualizations to an attentive audience at the CfA Phillips Auditorium. Gabriel’s Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) projects included text analysis of words used by Mitt Romney and Barak Obama during the Presidential campaign. NLTK… Read More
The DST4L class of November 4 featured the return of instructor Lyn Cherny, whom we last saw at the end of August when she taught a class on data manipulation and graphing in Excel. Lynn started her lecture by quoting a reporter she was talking to earlier this year, who said, “Data visuals are the… Read More
In our 9th week of #DST4L, Rahul Dave built on the previous week’s crash course in statistics with a deep dive into machine learning, classifiers, and information retrieval. First, this saw us working through further applications of scikit-learn, using a common pattern for classification: Create a classifier Fit the classifier with training values Run classifier.predict… Read More
Our #DST4L class on October 22nd was a whirlwind tour of probability, statistics, and machine learning in 3 hours. Before diving into that, I want to make sure you all know that the Python programming language was named after Monty Python. You may have figured this out if you’ve clicked on a Google result and… Read More
In this past week’s class on Tuesday, October 15th, we went back to our dataset of olive oils and their constituent fatty acids to learn some more about Pandas, NumPy, and MatPlotLib. As an aside, this course is doing strange things to my vocabulary. It takes me a bit to remember that pandas and pythons… Read More
Today we looked at exploratory data analysis and pandas using matplotlib. After hanging out with Tom Morris for the past five weeks, we switched it up and had a lecture from Rahul Dave. Rahul is a computational scientist at Harvard’s Astrophysics Data System. It had been a while since we’d played with Python, and there… Read More
