Data Carpentry: Workshops to Increase Data Literacy for Researchers

Abstract

In many domains the rapid generation of large amounts of data is fundamentally changing how research is done. The deluge of data presents great opportunities, but also many challenges in managing, analyzing and sharing data. However, good training resources for researchers looking to develop skills that will enable them to be more effective and productive researchers are scarce and there is little space in the existing curriculum for courses or additional lectures. To address this need we have developed an introductory two-day intensive workshop, Data Carpentry, designed to teach basic concepts, skills, and tools for working more effectively and reproducibly with data. These workshops are based on Software Carpentry: two-day, hands-on, bootcamp style workshops teaching best practices in software development, that have demonstrated the success of short workshops to teach foundational research skills. Data Carpentry focuses on data literacy in particular, with the objective of teaching skills to researchers to enable them to retrieve, view, manipulate, analyze and store their and other’s data in an open and reproducible way in order to extract knowledge from data.