DABS (Data and Bioinformation Stuff) Volume 1 Issue 9: Teaching how to code with the Carpentries.

The Center for Data and Bioinformation Services (CDABS) is the University of Maryland Health Sciences and Human Services Library hub for data and bioinformation learning, services, resources, and communication.

It has been a busy week here in CDABS-land! The CDABS team started the process of becoming certified Carpentries instructors with an intensive 4-day training. The Carpentries is a global community dedicated to teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers in an interactive and inclusive manner.

The centerpiece of the Carpentries program is the intensive 2-day (or 4 half-day) workshops that teach how to accomplish common tasks in popular open source programming languages. In addition to workshops, they make a great deal of material available online for self-paced learning – though it is hard to beat the experience you get from a full workshop! The Carpentries is an umbrella for three separate programs. each with a slightly different focus:

  1. Software Carpentry is intended for researchers who need to become more effective programmers in a short amount of time. Workshop lessons typically cover the Unix Shell, Git, and programming with either R or Python.
  2. Data Carpentry offers domain-specific training for data intensive tasks. Data Carpentry workshops also feature lessons in the Unix Shell, Git, R, and Python while working with datasets relevant to particular domains like Genomics and Social Sciences.
  3. Library Carpentry focuses on the needs of librarians and other information professionals. In fact, many of your HSHSL librarians recently went through this training! The curriculum includes lessons on the Unix Shell, Git, OpenRefine, and Regular Expressions.

Once we complete our certifications, we hope to bring these workshops to the UMB community, so be on the look out for more information. If you know you are interested in attending one of these workshops or arranging one for your group, please reach out and let us know!

Questions?

Contact: Amy Yarnell, Data Services Librarian and Jean-Paul Courneya, Bioinformationist – at data@hshsl.umaryland.edu.

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