The National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) provides cutting-edge research methods training and capacity building across the UK. The centre runs a diverse programme of courses, workshops and events throughout the year, covering a vast array of topics in a variety of interactive formats.
Find out more about their latest initiatives below:
Open Data Day (ODD) will take place from Saturday 1 to Friday 7 March. This annual global celebration highlights the importance of open data and its impact on communities worldwide. Local groups from almost every country will set up events throughout the week, showcasing how open data can be utilized within their communities. In 2025, ODD is focusing on the theme "Open Data to Tackle the Polycrisis," aiming to shed light on the interconnected issues of poverty, inequality, violence, and climate challenges.
Since 2023, ODD has embraced a more inclusive approach, allowing organizations to choose the best date for their events within a one-week window, promoting representation across different cultures and communities. All outputs from these events will be made available for anyone to use and re-use.
ODD is maintained and supported by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN) through the Open Knowledge Network.
Teaching Programming to Non-Programmers: Edinburgh Winter School 2024 will take place Wednesday, January 8, 2025, 9:00 – 17:00 at the University of Edinburgh, Usher Building (BioQuarter) and online.
This is a follow-up event to the successful 2024 edition which aims to offer opportunities to learn, share, and connect with peers in programming education.
The Winter School will feature practical sessions and discussions on:
Applications for attendees (online and in-person) have been extended to Sunday, January 5, 2025.
For questions, contact the organisers at pairprogramming@ed.ac.uk.
Migration and Xenophobia, microplastics, public domain works and wetlands were the four major social impact themes tackled by the winning teams of CoAfina 2024, the Latin American science and education hackathon, held on 19, 20 and 21 July. They convinced the judging panel by the quality of the solutions proposed using open access data. In this third edition, the podium was made up of students from seven universities in Venezuela, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru.
Eighty students from more than forty universities in Latin America dared to form multidisciplinary and multicultural teams to remotely solve one of the twelve challenges proposed in different scientific and humanistic areas of social impact, presented by professionals and researchers from different parts of the world. CoAfina thus achieves its mission: to create communities in Latin America and train new generations around knowledge and open data. See the challenges presented in the third edition of CoAfina, here.
The first place was awarded to the team called “Función Delta Pizza“, made up of four physics students from the Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado in Venezuela: Adriana Araña, Dalia García, Víctor Sánchez, and Bárbara Guanipa, who provided a solution to the detection of negative topics and discourses presented in the news of Colombian newspapers about Venezuelan migration. This challenge was presented by Mairene Tobón, a member of the Entre Dos Tierras Foundation in Colombia.
Second place went to the team “Neotropical 2.0″, made up of students from the Universidad Simón Bolívar, Universidad de Los Andes and Universidad Central de Venezuela (Venezuela); and the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Chimborazo, in Ecuador. The areas of study of the participants in this team were: biology (Emilio Toledo and Rubén Niño), physics (Andrés Caña and Cristian Usca) and anthropology (Isabella Sánchez). This team convinced the jury with their solution route for the citizen classification of microplastics, a challenge presented by Marga Rivas from the University of Cadiz (Spain) and Iskya Garcia from Creative Commons Venezuela.
Third place was awarded to the “Book Finders” team, made up of four Venezuelan students from the Universidad de Los Andes, Universidad Nacional Experimental del Transporte and Universidad Central de Venezuela, in the areas of physics (Reinaldo Díaz, Juan Martínez and Richard Brito) and engineering (Anibal Pico). This team focused its solution on the idea of optimising a Venezuelan search tool for public domain works, scalable to other countries, a challenge created by José Luis Mendoza from the Latin American Centre for Internet Research in Venezuela.
Finally, the team called “Data Fixers” received a special mention for the solution to the idea of citizen recognition of wetland transformations in Colombia, a challenge created by Alejandra Melfo and Yelitza León, from the Universidad de Los Andes (Venezuela) and Óscar Altuve from the Universidad Simón Bolívar de Venezuela. This team was made up of two systems engineering students from the Universidad Autónoma de Bucaramanga (Colombia): Adrián Parra and Luis Jaimes; a physics student from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo (Peru); and an electronic engineering student from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería (Peru).
David Sierra, professor at the Technological University of Bolivar (Colombia), who proposed two challenges at CoAfina 2024, expressed his satisfaction with the enthusiasm and creativity that the teams brought to their proposals: ‘I am amazed by the agility of these students from all over the Americas, by the willingness they have and the ideas they generate as a team,’ said Sierra. For her part, Iskya García, a challenger and member of the CoAfina organising committee, explicitly congratulated all the teams for their commitment to accepting something that transcends their area of expertise and described it as an expression of taking on a role as an agent of change in Latin America.
Finally, Reina Camacho, researcher at the French National Research Centre (CNRS) and one of the coordinators of CoAfina, underlined the capacity of the new generations in Latin America to actively participate in good practices that constitute different ways of doing science: ‘We are excited to know that some of the challenges that have been solved in these three editions can become prototypes to be developed in the medium term, with the participation of the community that joins in CoAfina’, an initiative that has already compiled some twenty challenges in the use of open data and that can become examples to be replicated in Latin America.
The awards ceremony culminated with a thank you to the organisations that have been strengthening the sustainability of this initiative. CoAfina is co-organised by LA-CoNGA Physics in collaboration with Creative Commons Venezuela, RedCLARA and the Academic Network of Ecuador (CEDIA). This edition was funded by the Open Research Funders Group (ORFG), inait.ai, the Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) and the Open Life Science (OLS) organisation. ‘See you at the next edition’ was the promise of this community that is growing every year.
Towards an International Research Software Conference: Join our Community Consultation
This post was first published on the Research Software Alliance website.
Join one of our upcoming webinars to discuss community-supported routes for convening the first-ever international research software conference in 2025/26, or provide feedback asynchronously on the options paper, Towards an international research software conference (version 2).
ReSA is engaging with key stakeholders to identify and recommend possible options, with three conference options proposed currently. These all share a common overarching aim of community building but differ in the communities they focus on.
The next stage of the development of these ideas is to gain feedback through open public consultation. This includes identifying stakeholders who would be interested in shepherding the development of at least one of these ideas in 2025/26, including possible pilots in 2025.
Anyone can provide feedback or ask questions through the following methods:
Zoom link, Meeting ID: 218 787 3236, Passcode: 446688
The closing date for input and feedback is Friday 15 November, 2024.
In the ever-evolving landscape of scholarly inquiry, the shift from analogue and mechanical to digital technologies known as the Digital Turn marks a pivotal moment, characterised by a convergence of technological advancements, new methods of information dissemination, and changing research practices. This transformative phase bears striking similarities to the Early Modern period (circa 1450-1700), where new tools such as the telescope and microscope, alongside the advent of the printing press, revolutionised scientific inquiry. Just as early modern scientists began to ask new questions about nature and the world, today's researchers are leveraging digital technologies to explore ideas and phenomena in novel ways. In both instances, the relationship between the tools of scientific inquiry and the scope of research is evident, echoing the SSI mantra: better software, better research.
During the conference Visualizing Science in Media Revolutions at the Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, led by Dr Sietske Fransen, these parallels were explored in depth. Among the highlights of the research group’s activities presented at the conference was a summary of the seminar series "Reflections on the Digital Turn in the Humanities and Sciences", organised by Sietske Fransen and myself. Held between October 2020 and December 2021, amidst the height of the pandemic, these seminars brought together 21 speakers from diverse backgrounds and countries, including scholars, artists, curators, archivists, and library professionals. Topics spanned a wide array, encompassing the shift from analogue to digital formats, advancements in book history, digital correspondence curation, image analysis tools, information management practices, digital model use, and the pandemic's impact on digital transition and remote collaboration.
A final publication detailing the outcomes of the seminars will be published in 2025 as part of the conference proceedings. A recurring theme throughout our discussions was the profound impact of the Digital Turn on scholarly practices. The accelerated shift to digital spaces, propelled by the pandemic, has facilitated broader participation and inclusivity in scholarly discourse. However, this development has also underscored the necessity of digital capital, highlighting the critical infrastructure and skills necessary to navigate the evolving digital landscape. Moreover, the reliance on digital tools and resources has exacerbated societal inequalities and raised concerns about data privacy, copyright, and the ethical representation of historical materials.
Many speakers emphasised the enduring importance of foundational skills such as archival work and manuscript editing. These aid in mitigating existing biases in library research collections, which are often amplified by current digitisation strategies that focus on the most researched and notable parts of their collections.
Another prevalent theme in the seminars was the shift from analogue to digital formats. Like their early modern counterparts in the age of the printing press, the advent of new technologies has revolutionised the way information is accessed, visualised, and analysed. Presenters explored the challenges and opportunities associated with digitising and consolidating diverse collections, stressing the significance of adopting shared standards to improve the discoverability and reusability of data, thereby enhancing its sustainability.
Similar to how the emergence of printing shops facilitated the convergence of scholars, printers, artists, and artisans from diverse national and cultural backgrounds, one of the most significant impacts of the Digital Turn on scholarly practices is its demand for a broader skill set and increased collaboration among scholars, data scientists, researchers, artists, and research software engineers. In this vein, the proliferation of new technologies and media has not only revolutionised how scholars and scientists access, visualise, and analyse information, but also catalysed the emergence of new communities of inquiry, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and the cross-fertilisation of ideas. However, while collaborative efforts between the humanities and sciences foster innovation and raise new questions, the indiscriminate application of disciplinary tools from one field to datasets from another carries inherent risks.
In conclusion, it is imperative to highlight the necessity of ongoing reflection and adaptation in response to evolving technologies and research methodologies. Scholars must remain vigilant in critically evaluating the implications of digital interventions on knowledge production and dissemination, ensuring the equality, diversity, inclusivity, and accessibility of scholarly practice. By embracing interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative approaches in an equitable manner, we can navigate the complexities of the Digital Age and drive meaningful change in the pursuit of knowledge, advancing our understanding of the past, present, and future.
Since becoming an SSI Fellow in 2023, I have chatted with other Fellows and attended the Collaborations Workshops, which gave me many ideas I had not thought about in my Fellowship plans. Meanwhile, within my role at UKCEH, colleagues in the Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC), a NERC EDS data centre, have started receiving requests to deposit model codes and are beginning to think more about how to curate and promote environmental model codes of long-term value. This open question led to discussions about the potential of bringing together data centres, software engineers, environmental modellers, and other practitioners for an ideation workshop to come up with principles to promote environmental model code of long-term value.
The UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UKCEH) has hosted on behalf of NERC Environmental Data Services (NERC-EDS) a workshop on the long-term value of environmental code on 21st November 2023. This workshop was funded and supported by the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship award. 38 people registered for the hybrid workshop, with a good mixture of modellers, data managers or data stewards, data scientists, and research software engineers from different environmental science sub-disciplines. Among those who attended are SSI fellows Tom Russell, James Bryne, and Sam Harrison.
The workshop began with a keynote talk by Prof Chris Jewell (Lancaster University) on “The Generalised Epidemic Modelling (GEM) project: automating real-time infectious disease analysis“ and its role in COVID-19 modelling and reporting. The role of reproducible workflow and cyberinfrastructure was highlighted, and a new high-level modelling language (based on Python) for epidemic modelling was introduced.
This was followed by 8 lightning talks, covering a range of topics and experiences. It is encouraging to see that many in our community have already thought deeply about this topic and are enthusiastic to further this goal.
The rest of the day comprised breakout discussions on the FAIR requirements of environmental model code of long-term value. One striking observation is that many of the suggestions are in alignment with the recently published FAIR for research software principles (FAIR4RS).
This event marks the start of a conversation on fostering the long-term value of environmental model code. If you would like to get involved, please get in touch with me or any of the SSI Fellows mentioned above. A follow-on blog post will highlight some of the findings of this workshop.
The workshop report is now published in Zenodo and NORA (NERC Open Research Archive).
RSE-HPC-2024 will be held as part of SC24 in Atlanta, GA, USA and online Sunday 17 November 2024, 9:00 am - 5:30 pm EST (UTC-5).
This workshop will bring together RSEs and allies involved in HPC, from all over the world, to grow the RSE community by establishing and strengthening professional networks of current RSEs and RSE leaders.
We encourage prospective participants to submit abstracts of proposed lightning talks (limit of 1 page, no format prescribed) on topics related to RSE issues. We particularly encourage talks on this year’s workshop theme of “RSEs and the Future of Computing” such as:
Other possible topics include, but are not limited to:
The authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to present lightning talks or participate in panel discussions at the workshop. Note that SC24 is planning an in-person event and presenting in-person is encouraged. A supporting digital experience will accommodate those who cannot attend in-person due to travel restrictions or health concerns.
We particularly encourage submissions from first-time conference presenters and from members of groups that have historically been underrepresented in the HPC community.
Abstracts should be submitted to the submission website. The deadline for submissions is Friday 2 August at 11:59 PM AoE (UTC-12).
Contact the organizers at sc-ws-rse-hpc@info.supercomputing.org
I was lucky to become an SSI fellow in 2022, (you can read a much longer article all about the journey that led through to this event here). I was definitely ambitious when I applied in speculating that during my fellowship (directly quoted from my fellowship screencast) I could:
Apparently, I was not a fan of commas at the time. I can take some heart in having achieved these objectives, to a greater or lesser extent, which will perhaps be the topic of another blog post. I won’t go into the activities I proposed, but there was one very clear goal, which I regretted ever suggesting, because it totally wasn’t my thing, to...
...”[use] the fellowship funding I propose to run a public, hybrid webinar for RSE/AI communities with talks covering (i) the use of data driven software…; (ii) the increasing adoption and importance of software in computational modelling and data analysis within polar science; (iii) talks/discussions/Q&A sessions on software oriented projects [within BAS]; and (iv) Discuss sustainable software in a polar operational context, especially when considering contribution to broader sustainability goals.”
What the hell was I thinking!?
Anyway, this all gets even funnier when you appreciate that in 2022, purely through chance and the side-stepping of various others, I ended up collaborating with some amazing folks at the Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3) to deliver Open Science and Sustainable Software for Data-driven Discovery. Perfect, I could use this as a satisfactory achievement of my fellowship objective. Phew, the deal is done.
Except… I didn’t plan to acknowledge this immediately and I am often forgetful. When I don’t like the experience of having done something, I’ll shut it out of my mind. The event went well, especially considering it was in the worst heatwave the UK had ever seen at the time, (cue the novelty of storing ice lollies in a minus-eighty degree freezer used for ice cores). But… I didn’t use the fellowship funds or write a blog about it afterwards and come 2023 I started planning a new training and conference-style hybrid event that accurately met the goal I’d set myself for the SSI Fellowship. I was unwound by my own lack of ingenuity and duplicity.
For some reason when I write these blog posts, I feel they probably have more value if you can take something away from them to use in your own experiences. Organising this event, I learned two key things: always be prepared to reschedule if you don’t feel it’s going to work, and it can take ten minutes to create a viable plan and then others can happily help you through delegation.
The first instance of this event, Software in Polar Science 2023, was meant to be in October. But things got very busy with the hiring of new staff for a newly established RSE team. My personal life was also unyielding to overwork (which is never a bad thing) and I was too cognitively overloaded to have any chance of “having a vision” (which, as a further piece of advice, you should always have for anything you need to plan). It is never a problem, especially relatively early on, to throw your hands up and say, “we need to move this”. I found my wonderful collaborators not only actively supportive, but happier with this change, which goes to show it’s never as dramatic as it seems.
In the end, we delivered the event in February 2024. The website was an important first point of call: having a singular point of reference means you can share your vision with others, it’s not just for the attendees but those involved in the organisation. We split the event into a training day and a “networking and showcasing” day. This allowed us to ensure that people could come and get something out of it that was concrete and allowed us to use the fellowship funds concretely to offer something for nothing to those who might not otherwise attend. This turned out to be a problem, as some people treat that trivially and don’t turn up, so there does need to be a safeguard to ensure places go to those who are willing to actually attend the event, but that’s another lesson learned.
I didn’t deliver the event, we did. The benefit of painting the vision for it via a simple website was that lots of enthusiastic people (probably more so than me in all honesty) got on board and made it all happen. What’s most interesting about this is that I just had to let the delegation of tasks happen, offering some guidance now and then (again, vision). Others benefited from undertaking certain tasks more than I would have because it connected people and exposed them to new things that brought them benefit. Delegation isn’t (just) about “slopey-shouldering” effort to others, but about empowering others to acquire the experiences you yourself take for granted.
As the overall navigator on this "vision quest" I could still get the experiences I wanted. One of these was to organise two Carpentries sessions: the first an incubated session on data science oriented python as a test (of both our ability to deliver them, the notion of doing them hybrid and my experience as a certified instructor) and the second on basic introduction to python skills on the first day of the event. Both were delivered and are now helping us structure a collaborative and community-led training and development programme within BAS.
The second day was much more about giving software exposure from within BAS, as well as giving those producing exposure to the sustainability causes and resources I’ve been exposed from the community: the all-important bidirectional knowledge share. Shoaib Sufi, the SSI community lead, totally bolstered and amplified the ethos of the event with the keynote on the role of sustainable software in research. The panel discussion brought Shoaib together with others who help to guide me on my journey around the research domain as a software engineer. Despite my ending up compering (a better candidate was scheduled, trust me) and the panel being a person down (a wonderful SSI fellow, Sadie Bartholemew, whose opinion I really wanted included was unable to attend), we hopefully promoted some interesting discussion around “polar science communities seek[ing] to engage with the fast changing, multidisciplinary sustainable software landscape”. Thanks to Shoaib, the panel members Scott Hosking and Alden Conner, and the BAS innovation director Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley for setting the scene with the opening remarks.
The most positive outcome undoubtedly goes to the showcasing of software in polar science. We had showcases from our polar oceans, space weather and artificial intelligence research teams, but also operational science showcases from the polar data centre, mapping and geographic information centre, antarctic marine engineering and our local collaborators Cambridge University’ Institute of Computing for Climate Science. The showcases really seemed to bolster conversation, create a sense of shared community and highlight why someone should run events like this.
I hope it’s not the last of these events, but events management is definitely not my bag. However, being bold (and stupid (and stubborn)) does sometimes pay off, hopefully this is the start of a broader set of showcases that can be linked up with broader communities, we only scratched the surface.
And I do mean we, the showcases were organised by Bryn Ubald, one of the new RSEs I’ve been lucky enough to add to our new Digital Innovation Team at BAS and Polina Sevastyanova from our innovation and impact team (yes, the two teams are massively intertwined, that’s a work in progress since we found a place for RSEs to sit). Both they and especially Lisa and Ellen at C2D3 for the administrative burdens and advice they provided and Pilvi and the BAS IT department for the conference centre setup and system, were instrumental in this coming off.
Why am I telling you all this? Because it shows how many people should be involved in something like this to make it work well. Don’t be afraid to let go and let things organise, who knows what you and others might learn from the experience!
(I definitely learned I’m not doing this again in a hurry… probably.)
R-Ladies Edinburgh were launched in October 2018 by a team of enthusiastic local organisers. Between 2018 and 2021, the group hosted 18 events - most initial events were in-person, but during lockdowns in 2020-21 they were moved online. In 2021, R-Ladies Edinburgh went a bit quiet, as some organisers left and others became very busy with other projects.
I was involved in R-Ladies Edinburgh from the start - first as a participant, and then as a co-organiser of online meetups where we analysed tidytuesday data together. I considered stepping up as a co-organiser back in 2021, but did not feel that I could take it on at that time (I was just changing jobs and life was just too busy). Receiving the Software Sustainability Institute Fellowship for 2023 provided the impetus I needed, and reviving R-Ladies Edinburgh became one of my main Fellowship goals.
Serendipitously, I found out on Twitter about a colleague, Alessia Calafiore, who recently joined the Edinburgh College of Art (part of the University of Edinburgh) and used R for spatial analysis. We met for coffee and she agreed to be the speaker at the R-Ladies relaunch event. We discussed dates and agreed that it would be nice to hold the event near International Women’s Day - we settled on 9th March as the date. The format would be an interactive talk, followed by unstructured time for networking over drinks and snacks.
During the event, Alessia discussed the basics of processing and visualising spatial data with R - she presented these topics in a way that was accessible for people who never analysed spatial data before (such as myself). She then presented a case study focused on the gender pay gap in Scotland - she used the 2011 Census data to calculate the proportion of women compared to men in the most senior professional category (C1), and showed us how to build a map illustrating this proportion in each electoral ward in Scotland. Alessia’s presentation (including all the data, code and explanation) can be found HERE. I immediately had ideas about how I could incorporate building maps into my teaching - I already asked my students to analyse Census data, and I think we could easily incorporate a bit of teaching about maps, to provide the students with another visualisation tool.
There were 14 enthusiastic R-Ladies in attendance, many from the University of Edinburgh, but also some from other organisations (e.g. Forest Research). After Alessia’s talk, most of us stayed and chatted about our experiences in academia, the process of learning and using R, and the different tools that we use to help in our research and coding practice (e.g. GitHub and Obsidian).
If you would like to join us (as a participant or as a speaker), please check out our Meetup page and join the group.
