Training

The Software Sustainability Institute is organising Carpentry Instructor Training workshop at the University of Manchester from 4th to 5th September 2017, just before WSSSPE5.1 and RSE 2017—making it a nice week in Manchester.

The Instructor Training is an intensive two-day workshop for trainers who wish to become Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry instructors. It is strongly recommended that attendees have some previous exposure to Data and/or Software Carpentry workshops, either as students, helpers, observers or co-instructors.

The event is sold out at the moment, but you can still join the waiting list.

The Institute is helping organise and run a Software Carpentry taster on 18 May 2017 at Digital Humanities @ Manchester Digital Texts workshops.

Together with our colleagues from Research IT, University of Manchester, and University of Sheffield Library, we are running a half-day introduction to the command line and automating tasks for the digital humanities based on the Software and Library Carpentry's shell lesson.

The Carpentry session will take place on the morning of day one of a two-day event comprising of three mini workshops on 18th & 19th May at the School of Digital Humanities in Manchester.

Registration is free and there are still places available.

For other workshops at the same event—run by Pip Willcox, Head of the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford—, see:

• Session 2, day 1

• Session 3, day 2

The Software Sustainability Institute has gathered information on the Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs) in a map, as some of them may require training in basic software development skills to help scientists improve or speed up their research, ensure that their results are more reliable and verifiable, encourage sharing code and collaboration with others and aid reproducibility overall. As the Institute already has multi-year training agreements with some CDTs relating to running and coordinating Software Carpentry (SWC) and Data Carpentry (DC) workshops, we were also interested to identify other centres, which may be interested in either helping with setting up regional training centres or setting up their own software training.

Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), also called Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs), are one of the several ways by which research councils in the UK provide support for advanced, high-level and increasingly interdisciplinary scientific training following undergraduate studies.

Go to the interactive map and find out more.

By James Baker, Lecturer in Digital History and Archives, University of Sussex, and Software Sustainability Institute Fellow

Librarians play a crucial role in cultivating world-class research and in most disciplinary areas today world-class research relies on the use of software. Established non-profit organisations such as Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry offer introductory software skills training with a focus on the needs and requirements of research scientists. Library Carpentry is a comparable introductory software skills training programme with a focus on the needs and requirements of library professionals: and by software skills, I mean coding and data manipulation that go beyond the use of familiar office suites. As librarians have substantial expertise working with data, we believe that adding software skills to their armoury is an effective and important use of professional development resource that benefits both library professionals and their colleagues and collaborators across higher education and beyond.

In November 2015 the first Library Carpentry workshop programme took place at City University London Centre for Information, generously supported by the…

The Software Sustainability Institute in conjunction with ELIXIR-UK and the BBSRC are organising a workshop entitled “Developing Software Licensing Guidance for BBSRC” in Manchester on 24 April 2017. The aim of this workshop is to develop community advice to BBSRC on:

• The areas within the life sciences where software is being used, and
• Appropriate written guidance for applicants and reviewers on how to make software reusable

Workshop attendees are drawn from a wide range of stakeholders representing life sciences researchers, research software engineers, funders, infrastructure providers, industry, legal experts, and related fields.

The workshop format will consist of scene-setting introductions, followed by two sets of discussions to agree and formulate specific guidance for BBSRC reviewers, applicants and users describing how to make software (re)usable that can be made available on the BBSRC website. Additionally, it is hoped that the workshop will provide a greater insight into the areas within the life sciences where software is being used and the current barriers to reuse.

For further information and registration, please visit the…

Jisc, in collaboration with Software Sustainability Institute, University of Cambridge, University of Sheffield, University of Bath, University of Leicester, University of Birmingham, the British Library and STFC are organising a number of workshops in January specifically for researchers that would like to know how to better manage their research software, or have real issues and would like some expert help.

The workshops are happening in the following locations:

• University of Birmingham, 9 January — speakers include Mike Croucher (Research Software Engineer)
• London, the British Library, 12 January — speakers include Neil Chue Hong (SSI)
• University of Cambridge, 16 January — speakers include Neil Chue Hong (SSI), Stephen Eglen, Kirstie Whitaker and Laurent Gatto (University of Cambridge)
• University of Leicester, 19 January — facilitators include Jonathan Tedds, Grant Denkinson, Jon Wakelin (University of Leicester)
• Engine Shed, Bristol Temple Meads, 20 January
• University of Sheffield, 25 January — speakers include Mike Croucher (Research Software Engineer), Prof Eleni Vasilaki (University of Sheffield), facilitators include Jez Cope (University of Sheffield)

Register for one of the workshops at our event page.

Everyone at the Software Sustainability Institute would like to wish our friends and colleagues all the best for the holiday season.

After a busy year, including the first Conference of Research Software Engineers, the announcement of a wonderful new set of Fellows, and even more events, Software and Data Carpentry workshops, and Open Call projects, we need a little break to get ready for everything we've planned in 2017. So please excuse us while we switch off our email from the 23rd December to the 2nd January, and enjoy the festive season (responsibly)!

Alexander Konovalov, Software Sustainability Institute fellow, helped organise and deliver the Second CoDiMa training school in Discrete Computational Mathematics, from 17th to 21st October 2016 in Edinburgh. Hosted at the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences, 26 learners representing 11 institutions from around the UK attended the event. The majority of attendees were PhD students in mathematics and computer science. The training was delivered by Christopher Jefferson, Alexander Konovalov , Steve Linton, Markus Pfeiffer and Wilf Wilson.

Read the full article at the CODIMA.

By Aleksandra Nenadic, Training Lead

Say you've got a Google spreadsheet with a column for addresses. It could be street addresses or postcodes. You want to map this data and embed the map into a website. Maybe you also want the map to update dynamically as more rows are added to the spreadsheet. What are your options?

This guide goes through the different ways to do this. However, to first map the data you’ll need to find the geocodes; i.e., latitude and longitude coordinates for these addresses. For locations that are more general, such as “UK”, geocoding APIs usually return the coordinates of the centroid—the area’s center point—or the capital.

Using Google My Maps

Google My Maps is a powerful tool designed to easily create custom maps from your data and share and publish maps online. You don’t need to worry about geocodes—they will be calculated for you out of addresses and postcodes.

To use this tool, you’ll need a Google account and you can either load data from a CSV, XSLX, KML or GPX file or link your Google spreadsheet (making sure it is either publicly available via "File" > "Publish to the web..." option in Google Spreadsheets or you have created a special sharing link for it).

…

Centres for Doctoral Training (CDTs), also called Doctoral Training Centres (DTCs), are one of the several ways by which research councils in the UK provide support for advanced, high-level and increasingly interdisciplinary scientific training following undergraduate studies.

Some of the CDTs may require training in basic software development skills in order to help scientists improve or speed up their research, ensure that their results are more reliable and verifiable, encourage sharing code and collaboration with others and aid reproducibility overall. For this reason, the Institute was interested in finding out the details of CDTs (supported by our funding organisations and close collaborators - EPSRS, BBSRC, ESRC, NERC and AHRC), including:

• their training strategy
• how many students are in their cohorts each year
• when did the first cohort start and when will the last cohort start
• how are they spread geographically

As the Institute already has multi-year training agreements with some CDTs relating to running and coordinating Software Carpentry (SWC) and Data Carpentry (DC) workshops, we were also interested to identify other such centres, as they were likely to be interested in either helping with setting up regional training centres or setting up their own software training.

The task of collecting details of CDTs was made easier by using information available in RCUK’s Gateway to Research, a website which provides information relating to publicly-funded research and training projects (and APIs to access that information programatically). Only a few adjustments had to be done manually (for missing, newly-announced centres) by looking directly on…