Mount A Libraries: Data and Digital Projects: Welcome

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Government Information & Statistics
by Laura Landon Last Updated Feb 4, 2025 102 views this year

Open Access
by Laura Landon Last Updated Aug 13, 2025 258 views this year

Research Data Management (RDM)
by Elizabeth Stregger Last Updated Aug 6, 2025 114 views this year

Data Services at Mount Allison University Library

The Data and Digital Services Librarian can help you find, organize, visualize, and share data.

Workshops for classes or research groups are available:

Accessing government data
Introduction to webscraping
Data cleaning
Working with regular expressions
Creating accessible visualizations
Storytelling with infographics
Introduction to Research Data Management
Making a Data Management Plan
Data deposit in Borealis
Version control
AI: Fact-checking and biases
AI: Plagiarism and checking sources

Introductory sessions on the following technologies are available for classes or research groups:

Excel
Zotero
LaTeX
Git and GitHub
R
Python
UNIX Shell

Do you have questions about data, research data management, or data information literacy? Let's talk!

Data Information Literacy Competencies

Data information literacy includes the following competencies (Carlson et al., 2015):

Introduction to databases and data formats
Discovery and acquisition of data
Data management and organization
Data conversion and interoperability
Quality assurance
Metadata
Data curation and reuse
Cultures of practice
Data preservation
Data analysis
Data visualization
Ethics, including citation of data

Carlson, J., Fosmire, M., Miller, C. C., & Sap Nelson, M. (2015). Determining data information literacy needs: A study of students and research faculty. In J. Carlson & L. R. Johnston (Eds.), Data information literacy: Librarians, data and the education of a new generation of researchers. Purdue University Press.

Training Sessions

ACENET Training
From introductory programming to sessions on machine learning and big data, ACENET has a wide range of training sessions.
ACENET training is free to academic researchers. Sign up with your Mount Allison University email account.
Data Carpentry
Data Carpentry workshops include introductory sessions on data management and analysis. Lessons are customized for astronomy, ecology, genomics, social sciences, and geospatial data. The material is openly available for re-use with attribution.
Elizabeth Stregger is a certified Carpentries instructor and can organize workshops for campus or community groups.
Programming Historian
Peer reviewed tutorials developed for digital historians that make use of open source software whenever possible.
Software Carpentry
Software Carpentry lessons focus on basic lab skills for research computing. Lessons include: working with the Unix Shell, version control with Git, programming with Python, programming with R, and R for reproducible scientific analysis. The lessons are freely available and can be reuse and remixed with attribution.
Elizabeth Stregger is a certified Carpentries instructor and can organize workshops for campus or community groups.

Recommended Books

Better Data Visualizations by Jonathan Schwabish
ISBN: 9780231193108

Publication Date: 2021-02-09

Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do's and don'ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart's design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations.
Dear Data by Giorgia Lupi; Stefanie Posavec; Maria Popova (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781616895327

Publication Date: 2016-09-06

Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly--small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical.
Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Claus O. Wilke
ISBN: 9781492031086

Publication Date: 2019-04-30

Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures.
R for Data Science by Hadley Wickham; Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel; Garrett Grolemund
ISBN: 9781492097402

Publication Date: 2023

Use R to turn data into insight, knowledge, and understanding. With this practical book, aspiring data scientists will learn how to do data science with R and RStudio, along with the tidyverse, a collection of R packages designed to work together to make data science fast, fluent, and fun.
Storytelling with Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
ISBN: 9781119002260

Publication Date: 2015-10-09

This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story.
Text Mining with R by Julie Silge, David Robinson
ISBN: 9781491981658

Publication Date: 2017, updated 2022

Using tidy data principles can make many text mining tasks easier, more effective, and consistent with tools already in wide use. Treating text as data frames of individual words allows us to manipulate, summarize, and visualize the characteristics of text easily and integrate natural language processing into effective workflows.