First Data Conversations 30 January 2017 – Summary of event & slides

The first Data Conversations happened on Monday, 31st of January 2017. Below is a quick overview of the action. You can find slides of four talks below.

Data Conversations Opening

The event was opened by Professor Adrian Friday from the Data Science Institute (DSI) who emphasised that the DSI is all about collaboration between disciplines which is also the spirit of Data Conversations. In fact the 25 attendees came from  a range of Departments: Biological and Life Sciences, Chemistry, Computing, Educational Research, History, Law, Lancaster Environment Centre, Politics, Psychology and others.

Data Conversations Talks

Unfortunately, Dr Chris Jewell from the Medical School had to cancel his talk. You can see an overview of the agenda below.

Leif Isaksen – Does Linked Data Have to be Open?

Leif Isaksen from the History Department (Leif is also involved in the Data Science Institute) presented the Pelagios Commons project which provides online resources for using open data methods to link and explore historical places.

Leif stressed that linking data is a social process which is built on open partnerships.

You can see Leif’s presentation below:

Jude Towers – Is Violent Crime Increasing or Decreasing?

Dr Jude Towers from Lancaster’s Sociology Department discussed crime rates, especially the rate of domestic violence over time through the Crime Survey for England and Wales. A current ESRC project is looking at how changing survey methodologies alter the underlying data of crime statistics.

Alison Scott-Baumann – Protecting participants and their data on a sensitive topic

Next up was Alison Scott-Baumann who is a Professor of Society and Belief in the Centre of Islamic Studies in the Near and Middle East Department at SOAS. Alison is the Project lead on (Re)presenting Islam on Campus. Lancaster is a project partner and Dr Shuruq Naguib added to Alison’s presentation.

Alison and Shuruq explained how difficult it is to get the balance right between confidentiality and data security required to manage often highly sensitive data, and to meet the expectations of data sharing. They stressed how much effort they spend on explaining the terms of the consent forms to project participants.

David Ellis – Building interactive data visualisations to support publications

Dr David Ellis showed the audience an example of dynamic data visualisation using a dataset he published on Lancaster University’s Research Registry. (http://dx.doi.org/10.17635/lancaster/researchdata/58). David explained how he used the R package Shiny Apps to achieve this.

David explained that the visualisation helps not only other researchers but also enables the interested public to query his data. One example was interest from journalists into his research into predicting smartphone operating system from personality and individual differences.

Chris Donaldson & James Butler – Mining and mapping places with multiple names

Finally, Dr Christopher Donaldson and Dr James Butler talked about their research using a 1.5 million word corpus of Lake District 18th and 19th century literature. Christopher and James use the Edinburgh Geoparser System to automatically recognise place names in text and disambiguate them with respect to a gazetteer.

James demonstrated how he can deal with name variations (secondary names), it is a lot of work. For example, the lake “Coniston” appears in the corpus as:  Thurstan, Coniston Lake, Coniston Water, Thurston, Conistone, Conistone Lake, Cunnistone Lake, Thurston Lake, Coniston Mere, Lake of Coniston, Conis- ton, Conyngs Tun, Conyngeston, Thorstane’s watter, Turstinus.

Feedback so far

The feedback from attendees and presenters so far so far is encouraging.

Enjoyed the presentations. I hope these data conversations will become a nice community for those interested in data. Relaxed and nicely themed but not too prescribed. The venue was good and the cakes and biscuits were very good!

We got some comments on the length of the presentations and question time.

Really enjoyable – perhaps a bit more time for each speaker / questions and discussions.

We will look into amending the format. We do like to keep a balance between time for data stories and discussions and giving a number of Lancaster researchers a forum to talk about their experiences. Thanks for the comments and suggestions so far!

Upcoming: 2nd Data Conversations 4th of May

We hope to report on some of the data presentations in more detail in future blog posts. Meanwhile, we are already preparing for the next Data Conversations event on 4th of May (1.45-4 pm). The theme of the event will be “Data Security and Confidentiality”, and registrations are open: http://bit.ly/ludatacon2. Please come along and if you have any questions get in touch with the RDM Support Team: rdm@lancaster.ac.uk.