Continuing our 23 Research Things programme reflections:
Thing 17: Survey Tools
I see the invaluable Doodle polls are mentioned, which are useful in planning meetings for example we used one to plan our marketing team meeting recently also our office party. Survey Monkey is useful too and in 2005/6 I led a team who used it to plan a survey of 4,000 CILIP in London members, although in the end CILIP Staff transferred it to some proprietory software that CILIP had access to- perhaps it was the Qualtrics that I am pleased to hear our University members now have at their fingertips. Google Forms are also worth mentioning here although there have been some cases of users losing responses and one cannot access earlier versions of a form online.
Thing 18: Research Data Management
The team give an interesting breakdown on different kinds of data:
I do have some experience of data management: when writing my book I kept many different versions of my book and I learned to name the files with American style dates so that the versions filed in the correct order, for instance book20161221 would be the version for the 21st December. Lots of copies keeps stuff safe, as they say, so I did put copies on a SkyDrive too and sent them as emails to myself so they were stored remotely. However occassionally it would get a bit confusing.
We store some survey results on Google Forms but recently a few responses somehow got deleted: we could see from the automatic unique identifier numbering that they were missing. Google forms does not keep earlier versions of files so the data was lost and in future we may encourage staff to download backup copies of files before working on them.
I don't pay for online backups although this is probably the best option: it is expensive and instead I use an external hard drive which I store off site. For work purposes our computer department keeps copies of all files and web pages for three months.
Thing 19: Text and Data Mining (TDM)
I have to say that now, at Thing 19, I am reaching perhaps the limits of what I know already, since I did not know much about data mining before reading this. I did attend a Medical Hack day once, which was very enlightening. Since the post was rather short I'm not sure I know much more than I did before, except that such a concept exists. But I guess this is the sort of thing that Acxiom and Google do all the time.
Thing 20: Presenting your Data
Canva, Easel.ly, Pictochart and Google Charts can help you display your data in an attractive and meaningful way by supplying templates. Newpapers, particularly Saturday newspapers, delight in presenting information in clever ways using infographics. I looked at Canva and noticed that they provide templates for posters and website banners and all sorts of things. It would be nice to make an infographic of our library activities to market our services internally but I don't have the data to hand so I made this instead (see picture).
Thing 17: Survey Tools
I see the invaluable Doodle polls are mentioned, which are useful in planning meetings for example we used one to plan our marketing team meeting recently also our office party. Survey Monkey is useful too and in 2005/6 I led a team who used it to plan a survey of 4,000 CILIP in London members, although in the end CILIP Staff transferred it to some proprietory software that CILIP had access to- perhaps it was the Qualtrics that I am pleased to hear our University members now have at their fingertips. Google Forms are also worth mentioning here although there have been some cases of users losing responses and one cannot access earlier versions of a form online.
Thing 18: Research Data Management
The team give an interesting breakdown on different kinds of data:
- "According to MIT, data can be classified into four types:
- Observational. Data captured in real time that is usually irreplaceable and can include anything from survey data to images of someone’s brain.
- Experimental. This can be data from lab work which can be reproducible such as gene sequences.
- Simulation. This can be data generated from test models where the models themselves are sometimes more important than the results, such as climate or economic models
- And finally :
- Derived or compiled data: This is data that is reproducible and can include 3D models, text and data mining, and compiled databases."[edited].
I do have some experience of data management: when writing my book I kept many different versions of my book and I learned to name the files with American style dates so that the versions filed in the correct order, for instance book20161221 would be the version for the 21st December. Lots of copies keeps stuff safe, as they say, so I did put copies on a SkyDrive too and sent them as emails to myself so they were stored remotely. However occassionally it would get a bit confusing.
We store some survey results on Google Forms but recently a few responses somehow got deleted: we could see from the automatic unique identifier numbering that they were missing. Google forms does not keep earlier versions of files so the data was lost and in future we may encourage staff to download backup copies of files before working on them.
I don't pay for online backups although this is probably the best option: it is expensive and instead I use an external hard drive which I store off site. For work purposes our computer department keeps copies of all files and web pages for three months.
Thing 19: Text and Data Mining (TDM)
I have to say that now, at Thing 19, I am reaching perhaps the limits of what I know already, since I did not know much about data mining before reading this. I did attend a Medical Hack day once, which was very enlightening. Since the post was rather short I'm not sure I know much more than I did before, except that such a concept exists. But I guess this is the sort of thing that Acxiom and Google do all the time.
Thing 20: Presenting your Data
Canva, Easel.ly, Pictochart and Google Charts can help you display your data in an attractive and meaningful way by supplying templates. Newpapers, particularly Saturday newspapers, delight in presenting information in clever ways using infographics. I looked at Canva and noticed that they provide templates for posters and website banners and all sorts of things. It would be nice to make an infographic of our library activities to market our services internally but I don't have the data to hand so I made this instead (see picture).
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