Data Carpentry Workshop

A Data Carpentry Workshop was organised on 16 and 17 of May. This full two-day event was held in TR003, IT Services Building, University of Malta and was open to all University of Malta faculty and research staff, students and other researchers particularly researchers in life sciences areas (UM Newspoint).

The event was organised to teach basic concepts, skills and tools for managing, analyzing and sharing more effectively large amounts of data collected during research. The workshop was aimed at researchers in the life sciences at all career stages and designed for learners with little to no prior knowledge of programming, shell scripting, or command line tools. The audience were trained by our collaborators from the University of Cambridge remotely by live-streaming. Dr Jean Paul Ebejer from the Centre for Molecular Medicine and Biobanking was the local trainer during the event.

The programme included the following:

• How to use spreadsheet programs (such as Excel) more effectively, and the limitations of such programmes
• Getting data out of spreadsheets and into more powerful tools (such as RStudio)
• Data management and manipulation
• Data visualisation
• Workflows and automating repetitive tasks, in particular using the command line shell
• The use of OpenRefine
• The use of SQLite

Access the schedule and course material.

Refer to the guidelines on how to download the software.