If you’ve ever loaded a research dataset into Tableau, you’ve probably been a bit intimidated. The interface templates are set up to analyze things like “Regional Sales” or “Shipping Costs,” …
Breaking Tableau Out of the Boardroom
Category: Guides, Tutorials, Reviews
AI Literacy for Research: Why Operational Fluency Is Not Enough
As LLMs move into research settings, social scientists face a familiar but newly urgent problem: how to incorporate a powerful new tool without surrendering methodological clarity. These systems can support …
An Introduction to Matplotlib
In Python, the most widely used library for creating various kinds of visualizations is Matplotlib. In this post, we will introduce the core ideas behind Matplotlib and illustrate them through …
The Walled Garden: Care and Containment in AI Research
Introduction: On the Ethics of Boundaries AI, especially in research, is often imagined as an infinite horizon, with models expanding endlessly, datasets merging across domains, and knowledge networks collapsing boundaries …
Human in the Loop: Interpretive and Participatory AI in Research
Across every field I know, including urban studies, environmental science, design, and social research, the presence or question of AI and its possibilities or challenges has become unavoidable. We seem …
Reordering Graphs in ggplot Plot: A Step-by-Step Guide
When we create a plot using ggplot() in R, the order of the categories on the x-axis is set by default. However, for better clarity and aesthetics, we often want to …
Let’s Build a Browser Extension!
Browser Extension Basics Browser extensions are simple tools that allow you to enhance your web browsing experience and workflows. For instance, one of my favorite extensions, Hypothes.is, allows you to …
Building Your First Database in SQL – GC Digital Fellows
Building Your First Database in SQL Creating a database is a fundamental skill for most social science and humanities researchers, and PostgreSQL is an excellent choice to get started with …
The GCDI Guide to Password Management – GC Digital Fellows
The GCDI Guide to Password Management Graduate Center students! Don’t sleep on the absurd number of usernames and passwords you will be required to remember! Think you can just keep …
Finding the Perfect OCR – GC Digital Fellows
In this week’s Tagging the Tower post, GC Digital Fellow Leanne Fan explains how to extract text from images. If you’ve ever saved a photograph of a newspaper or book …
