This Week @ GCDI

By Param Ajmera

Welcome to another packed week at GC Digital Initiatives! I want to begin this week’s post by reminding everyone of several upcoming deadlines for exciting opportunities:

This week we’re also offering one workshop from our Python Series that covers how to do Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup. We will also be hosting the R User Group meeting on Friday, November 11. Moreover, you won’t want to miss GC Digital Fellow Silvia Rivera Alfaro’s latest blog post which provides an introductory overview of WordPress, the world’s most popular website creation platform.

You can find out more on our website (http://cuny.is/gcdi), which includes weekly posts about ongoing events, and through social media. Follow us on Twitter (@cunygcdi and @digital_fellows) and now on Instagram (@digital_fellows).

Table of Contents

  1. Calls for Applications: Applications are now open for the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, the GC Digital Research Institute, the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants, and the Data For Public Good program. More information about these opportunities are below
  2. Workshops: Workshops are structured, hands-on learning opportunities that are free and open to all GC-affiliated students, faculty, and staff. Registration using the links below is required to receive a Zoom link.
  3. User Group Meetings: User Group meetings are informal, interdisciplinary, free, and CUNY-wide communities of researchers and pedagogues who use similar digital tools. This week the Mapping User Group and the Python User Group will be meeting. These meetings offer a welcoming space for beginners through advanced researchers to discuss potential projects, current challenges, or specific problems. Instructions on how to join each group can be found below.
  4. Python Series: If you’ve always wanted to learn how to use Python to improve your research, now is your opportunity to join a short workshop series that GC Digital Fellow Rebecca Krisel and Postdoctoral Fellow Chelsea Lane are leading this month. The series includes 5 workshops that take participants from the basics through ingesting data using APIs. Don’t forget to register for each workshop!

Calls for Applications

DHI Lightning Talks, Applications Now Open

Interested in digital humanities at CUNY? Have a project to share? Sign up to attend as an audience member or to present your digital humanities project, research, or questions with students, faculty, and staff from across CUNY’s campuses!
Learn more and apply: General CFP for students/faculty

GC Digital Research Institute, January 18 – 24, 2023, Apply by Monday, November 28 @11:59pm ET

The GC Digital Research Institute (DRI) is an introduction to core digital research skills that can be applied widely to different kinds of projects. This institute is catered towards building foundational skills and will be paced accordingly to ensure those who are new will leave feeling more confident in their skills. DRI is designed for beginning learners—those who have little or no prior experience working with a programming language. Participation is free, and open to graduate students, faculty, and staff at the Graduate Center; however, applications are required. The GC Digital Research Institute provides an introduction to computational thinking, vocabularies, and foundational concepts so that participants can develop the necessary skills to become an autonomous learner.
Learn more and apply: GC Digital Research Institute website.

Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants (PDIG) Apply by Friday, November 11th @ 5 PMApplications for the Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants (PDIG) are supported this year through generous funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) as part of the American Rescue Plan. Apply for financial support for training in digital skills (up to $500), to start and create a proof of concept digital project (up to $2,000), or to implement a proof of concept (up to $6,000). All Spring 2023 matriculated master’s and doctoral students in good standing are eligible to apply.More information available on our website: https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/10/17/pdig22-23/To apply, complete the application at http://cuny.is/pdig22-23.

Data for Public Good Apply by Tuesday, November 8, 2023 @ 5 PMFor the fifth year, GC Digital Initiatives and the Mina Rees Library are accepting applications from Graduate Center students who have achieved an introductory fluency with the Python programming language to participate in a collaborative project designed to provide experience working with public-facing data and programming to produce a collaborative project for the public good. This year, applications will be accepted as collaborative proposals from groups of 3-8 students. Applications will consist of a proposed dataset and project plan. Successful teams will have the opportunity to work with advisors, draw on local expertise– in project management, outreach, development, Python programming, website design, data visualization, and more– and will each receive $1,000 stipends to support the realization of their project.More information is available on our website: https://gcdi.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/10/17/d4pg22-23/To apply, complete the application at http://cuny.is/d4pg22-23.

Workshops

NOTE: All workshops will take place on Zoom. Registration is free but required in order to receive the Zoom link.

Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup, Friday, November 11th, 2:00 – 4:00 PM

Learn how to extract text from web pages using the Python library Beautiful Soup. Part four of the fall Python Intensive Workshops: An Exploration of Research Tools for Beginners.

Learn more and register here: Web Scraping with Beautiful Soup

Mapping Your Way Into Mapping: An Intro to GIS Concepts, Wednesday, November 16, 4:30-6pm

This one-hour workshop is aimed at introducing you to the basic concepts of Geographic Information System (GIS). We will understand the main types of spatial formats in which we can describe our data, the characteristics of each format and how to combine them to efficiently convey information in a map format. The features available to display spatial data will be exemplified using the software QGIS (https://qgis.org/en/site/). By the end of the workshop, you will know how to 1) load spatial information into QGIS; 2) combine different sources of data to efficiently communicate your objectives/results; 3) customize your final map to your preferences.

Learn more and register here: Mapping Your Way Into Mapping: An Intro to GIS Concepts

User Group Meetings

R User Group Meeting, Friday, Oct 14th, 3:00 – 4:00 PMAre you using R in your classes? Testing the waters with data analysis? The R User Group meeting (RUG) is a beginner-friendly and informal opportunity to learn about R from peers who are working with similar projects and tools. As a group, we will decide what R topics to learn based on participants’ interests.

Join our CUNY Academic Commons User Group here in order to receive the Zoom link for the meeting and for updates about future meetings.

 

Python Series

Fall Python Series: An Exploration of Research Tools for Beginners, biweekly Fridays from 2-4pm, continuing Friday, October 14th.  

The Fall Python Series comprises 5 total workshops that take students from never having used Python before through skills such as text analysis and data cleaning to web scraping and using APIs. Participants are expected to sign up for all workshops in the series (listed below) and maintain regular participation. If you missed our Introduction to Python workshop on 9/30, you are welcome to catch up using our online curriculum and join us for the remaining workshops. Core skills will continue to be explained and reinforced as we work on projects over the course of the semester and in Python User Group (PUG) meetings that meet alternative weeks on Fridays from 3-4:00PM.

Please register for the following workshops to take part in the Fall Python Series:

New on our Blog: Digital Fellow Silvia Rivera Alfaro prepared this introductory overview of WordPress, the world’s most popular website creation platform.

Follow us on social media!Twitter: @Digital_Fellows, @cunycdiInstagram: @digital_fellowsLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gc-digital-initiatives/

 

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.