Research Software Engineering for Data Driven Discovery
April 27, 2017
The Data Driven Discovery Research Priority Area includes researchers from across all five faculties of the university, all working with novel ways of interacting with data. When we were looking to test a research software engineering service, to see what value it might bring to researchers and how it might work, the RPA members were natural …
Evidencing the Impact of TexGen Software
TexGen is an open source piece of software that models the geometry of textile structures. Developed here at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Nottingham and made freely available to the research and industrial communities through a General Public Licence, it is currently hosted and distributed on the SourceForge site. TexGen Website TexGen is …
JISC Workshop on Digital Skills for Researchers
April 26, 2017
The Digital Research Team visited Newcastle yesterday to take part in a workshop run by JISC. The aim was to help explore what role they can play in supporting researchers in attaining the right level of digital skills. There were around 20 people from different institutions, with Research Software Engineers, Librarians, Research Managers and Digital …
Digital Innovation in Arts Impact
April 13, 2017
As Digital Research Manager, and previously as Digital Humanities Manager, I’ve been working with a number of digital Arts projects over the last few years. A lot of that work has been about helping researchers to use digital tools to enhance the process of doing research. For this case study, I plan to investigate a …
Emerging Research Opportunities from Digitised Newspaper Data
April 7, 2017
The Digital Research team are facilitating the digitisation of some paper-based research data in the form of a newspaper article archive. We have hired an administrative assistant who has made a great start at scanning in the thousands of articles that were collated across the last decade. Roughly speaking it is taking about 1 hour to …
Surveying Traditional and Digital Consumption of Fake News
The Digital Research Team are facilitating a collaboration between the Schools of Sociology and Social Policy, and Computer Science. The team, led by Christian Karner and Martin Flintham, are looking to apply sociological research methods to explore fake news in social media. Following a detailed literature review, the team are moving forward with the first stage of …
Xerox Printers as a Research Tool
March 31, 2017
The Digital Research Team are currently supporting researchers in the digitisation of paper-based research data. Dr Christian Karner in the School of Sociology and Social Policy has gathered around 5000 newspaper clippings over the last 10-15 years as a part of his research. While he knows the data very well, it can be slow to …
Introducing Handwriting Technologies
March 30, 2017
The Digital Research Team are currently running an initiative to explore the digitisation of paper-based research data. Having done some ethnographic work myself, I am all too aware of the amount of paper based research data that can be generated, with many full physical note books in a matter of days. We all know the …
Digitising Paper Based Research Data: Digital Research Initiative 1 2017
As a Digital Research Specialist, researchers often say to me: “What do I need technology for?” This comes as no surprise since many types of research do not immediately lend themselves to digital technology. For instance Ethnography, the systematic study of people and cultures, is typically achieved through just using pen and paper. In fact, …
Working toward the provision of cloud compute services
March 29, 2017
The digital research team are actively working with Information Services to provide access to appropriate cloud services for the University. As a part of trialling a new Research Software Engineering service in the School of Geography, it quickly became clear to us the need to secure access to the cloud. This was driven by (1) …
