Many humanities researchers have some form of geographical information included in their research, such as objects, images, or texts from or about a particular place; narratives about a person’s movement or a place’s change over time; or information about networks of people or organizations. Whether places and spaces are at the heart of your research or are a part of it, mapping can help answer research questions and generate new ones by visualizing your data in new ways. It can help tell a story about place or space. This two-part workshop series will help humanities researchers map their place-based research with ArcGIS.

Exploring the spatial elements of your research
The first workshop will cover the nuts and bolts of getting started mapping with ArcGIS. We will discuss how to extract data from your research, get it ready for analysis, and upload it into ArcGIS.

Mapping the spatial elements of your research
The second workshop will cover spatial analysis - the potential applications of your geographic information. We will demonstrate the analytic functions included in ArcGIS and discuss how to create context for your spatial data. We will also introduce Story Maps, an app that helps turn place-based information into narratives with a combination of maps, images, and text. Note: for this workshop, we will assume that you have already attended the first workshop or are comfortable with the material covered there.

 

Many humanities researchers have some form of geographical information included in their research, such as objects, images, or texts from or about a particular place; narratives about a person’s movement or a place’s change over time; or information about networks of people or organizations. Whether places and spaces are at the heart of your research or are a part of it, mapping can help answer research questions and generate new ones by visualizing your data in new ways. It can help tell a story about place or space. This two-part workshop series will help humanities researchers map their place-based research with ArcGIS.

Exploring the spatial elements of your research
The first workshop will cover the nuts and bolts of getting started mapping with ArcGIS. We will discuss how to extract data from your research, get it ready for analysis, and upload it into ArcGIS.

Mapping the spatial elements of your research
The second workshop will cover spatial analysis - the potential applications of your geographic information. We will demonstrate the analytic functions included in ArcGIS and discuss how to create context for your spatial data. We will also introduce Story Maps, an app that helps turn place-based information into narratives with a combination of maps, images, and text. Note: for this workshop, we will assume that you have already attended the first workshop or are comfortable with the material covered there.

 

Ever feel like your success is due to luck?  That others around you are more intelligent?  That your graduate program made a mistake admitting you--a mistake they might realize soon?  If you have struggled with feeling like you don’t fit in academia, this workshop is for you.   We will focus on understanding and challenging “impostor syndrome”—a remarkably common syndrome amongst graduate students.  You will learn about research on the topic, hear others’ experiences and reflect on your own, and discover some concrete tools for dealing with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours associated with feeling like an imposter.

Presenter:

Dr. Susan Brook
Clinical Counsellor, Health and Counselling Services

Susan has an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology from UBC, and works in Health and Counselling with a particular focus on graduate students.  She is currently running a Dissertation/Thesis Support Group and will soon be offering individual drop-in consultations with graduate students.  Susan is also a part-time faculty member in the English Department, and received her PhD in Literature from Duke University.  Susan is passionate about helping students navigate the institutional and personal stresses of graduate school life.

Collect. Describe. Store. Backup. Preserve. Share.

Draft a plan to manage your research data and ensure its openness over time. The focus of this workshop will be working with DMP Assistant, an online data management plan utility. A sample case will be provided or build a plan using your research.

Note: Please bring your own fully charged laptop to this workshop.

GitHub is a website and hosting service that is celebrated in tech circles. Did you know that it's useful for non-programmers? In this hands-on workshop, we'll be covering the fundamentals of GitHub including repositories, version control, project management, wikis, and Gist. The content is designed for novice users; all learners are welcome. Come to discover how this digital tool can improve collaboration in your research projects.  To participate in this workshop, you must bring a laptop (preferred) or a tablet. You may be contacted with software installation instructions prior to the event.

The OSF is a free, open-source web app that manages research projects at all stages of the research lifecycle. It is used for documentation, file storage, versioning, collaboration, and it connects the various tools researchers currently use. The OSF is produced by the Center for Open Science (COS) and has over 60,000 users across various academic disciplines. Attend the workshop to learn more and explore the OSF here: https://osf.io/

Python is a popular language for scientific computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well.

This 2-day hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. This workshop is offered by Software Carpentry, whose mission is to help scientists and engineers get more research done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic lab skills for scientific computing.

Want to make your research and writing more efficient? Hate the last minute rush of trying to create a correctly formatted bibliography? This workshop is for you! We will introduce Zotero, a citation management tool that can help you import, organize, share, and manage your citations and documents, as well as create correctly formatted in-text citations and bibliographies in almost any style -- in seconds.

Bring your laptop: this interactive workshop will cover registration, installation, and everything that you need to know to get up and running with Zotero.

Designed for students new to Geographic Information Systems (GIS), this workshop will introduce basic GIS concepts using the ArcGIS software environment.

Topics will include:

• ArcGIS software basics
• Creating simple maps
• Finding geospatial data and resources

The workshop assumes attendees have no previous experience with GIS.

QGIS is open-source GIS software for creating maps and viewing, editing, and managing spatial data in a wide variety of commonly used vector and raster formats. Free to download, QGIS can be installed on Mac, Windows, Linux, and Unix operating systems; however, this workshop will only cover QGIS for Macs. This workshop will provide an introduction to the basic features of QGIS using data from the Lower Mainland.

Workshop attendees will need to bring a Mac laptop with the latest version of QGIS for Macs fully installed prior to the workshop. You can download QGIS for Macs here.

This workshop will deepen your knowledge of attribute tables. You will learn to add new data in an existing table, import data from an Excel worksheet, join two tables together, convert a list of XY coordinates to a shapefile, and create simple SQL-queries.

Covered in this workshop:

• Editing an attribute table
• Importing Excel tables and XY coordinates into ArcMap
• Formulating queries
• Table join
• Formulating queries
• Generating statistics from an attribute table and summarizing a field
• Use of the field calculator

This workshop will provide an introduction to vector analysis, attribute handling, and the formulation of spatial queries.

This workshop will cover:

• Searching by attribute
• Making spatial queries
• Exporting query results to shapefiles

Many humanities researchers have some form of geographical information included in their research, such as objects, images, or texts from or about a particular place; narratives about a person’s movement or a place’s change over time; or information about networks of people or organizations. Whether places and spaces are at the heart of your research or are a part of it, mapping can help answer research questions and generate new ones by visualizing your data in new ways. It can help tell a story about place or space. This two-part workshop series will help humanities researchers map their place-based research with ArcGIS.

Exploring the spatial elements of your research
The first workshop will cover the nuts and bolts of getting started mapping with ArcGIS. We will discuss how to extract data from your research, get it ready for analysis, and upload it into ArcGIS.

Mapping the spatial elements of your research
The second workshop will cover spatial analysis - the potential applications of your geographic information. We will demonstrate the analytic functions included in ArcGIS and discuss how to create context for your spatial data. We will also introduce Story Maps, an app that helps turn place-based information into narratives with a combination of maps, images, and text. Note: for this workshop, we will assume that you have already attended the first workshop or are comfortable with the material covered there.

 

Many humanities researchers have some form of geographical information included in their research, such as objects, images, or texts from or about a particular place; narratives about a person’s movement or a place’s change over time; or information about networks of people or organizations. Whether places and spaces are at the heart of your research or are a part of it, mapping can help answer research questions and generate new ones by visualizing your data in new ways. It can help tell a story about place or space. This two-part workshop series will help humanities researchers map their place-based research with ArcGIS.

Exploring the spatial elements of your research
The first workshop will cover the nuts and bolts of getting started mapping with ArcGIS. We will discuss how to extract data from your research, get it ready for analysis, and upload it into ArcGIS.

Mapping the spatial elements of your research
The second workshop will cover spatial analysis - the potential applications of your geographic information. We will demonstrate the analytic functions included in ArcGIS and discuss how to create context for your spatial data. We will also introduce Story Maps, an app that helps turn place-based information into narratives with a combination of maps, images, and text. Note: for this workshop, we will assume that you have already attended the first workshop or are comfortable with the material covered there.

 

Python is a popular language for scientific computing, and great for general-purpose programming as well.

This 2-day hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. This workshop is offered by Software Carpentry, whose mission is to help scientists and engineers get more research done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic lab skills for scientific computing.

NVivo is a qualitative data analysis software program, but what does that mean -- and what does it mean for your research? Find out what NVivo is, when to use it, and how to get started.

In this hands-on introductory workshop, you'll take a tour of the NVivo software environment, using sample data. You’ll be introduced to NVivo’s functions and you’ll leave equipped with the basic info you need to begin working with NVivo. Topics introduced may include importing files and beginning coding.

This workshop is suitable for those with little or no experience using NVivo or other qualitative data analysis software.

Notes:
1. This workshop is for NVivo for Mac. The Windows interface is significantly different. Please check here for NVivo for Windows workshops being offered.
2. Please bring your own Mac laptop preloaded with the latest version of NVivo. You can download NVivo and the license key with your SFU computing ID by using the self-serve download link here. If you are unable to get past the authentication page, then please email nvivo-rc@sfu.ca.

NVivo is a qualitative data analysis software program, but what does that mean -- and what does it mean for your research? Find out what NVivo is, when to use it, and how to get started.

In this hands-on introductory workshop, you'll take a tour of the NVivo software environment, using sample data. You’ll be introduced to NVivo’s functions and you’ll leave equipped with the basic info you need to begin working with NVivo. Topics introduced may include importing files and beginning coding.

This workshop is suitable for those with little or no experience using NVivo or other qualitative data analysis software.

This interactive workshop introduces importing and coding of literature review materials and key tools that can be particularly helpful when reviewing literature in your area of research.

Topics covered include: introducing NVivo and setting up a project working with your information identifying themes, topics and ideas and collecting data to support them using tools such as text search query, matrix coding query, and Framework Matrix.

What will you achieve from this course? At the end of this, you will have the knowledge to set up a literature review in NVivo, and begin to work with your information. You will also be able to use NVivo to organize your content and begin to identify themes, topics or ideas.

It is appropriate for those who have had some experience with NVivo or who have taken the Nuts and Bolts of NVivo workshop. For more information about NVivo at SFU, please visit NVivo Software for Research Analysis.

Participants should also have some familiarity with citation management software (Zotero, Mendeley, Refworks, EndNote, etc).

Note: You will need to bring your own Mac laptop, loaded with the latest version of NVivo for Mac.

This interactive workshop introduces importing and coding of literature review materials and key tools that can be particularly helpful when reviewing literature in your area of research.

Topics covered include:

• introducing NVivo and setting up a project
• working with your information
• identifying themes, topics and ideas and collecting data to support them
• using tools such as text search query, matrix coding query, and Framework Matrix. 

What will you achieve from this course? At the end of this, you will have the knowledge to set up a literature review in NVivo, and begin to work with your information. You will also be able to use NVivo to organize your content and begin to identify themes, topics or ideas.

It is appropriate for those who have had some experience with NVivo or who have taken the Nuts and Bolts of NVivo workshop. For more information about NVivo at SFU, please visit NVivo Software for Research Analysis.

Participants should also have some familiarity with citation management software (Zotero, Mendeley, Refworks, EndNote, etc). Zotero will be used during this workshop.

This workshop is designed for non-science students interested in the statistical computing program R. No prior knowledge of R is required. Often data outside of the sciences includes textual data, such as a corpus or series of surveys. In this workshop we’ll learn how to process textual data in R, as well as the basic skills to start analyzing it. Specific topics covered include the R environment (directories, workspace, scripts, and packages), data structures (vector, matrix, data frames, lists), and the beginnings of simple data analysis (built-in statistical packages, elementary statistics, etc.).

Note: Workshop participants will need to bring their own laptops, with R and RStudio installed prior to attending the workshop.

Growing amount of data is available over the web. However, this data is usually presented in an unstructured HTML format which poses a challenge to researchers who want to automatically capture the data and convert it into a form appropriate for analysis. Web scraping is a computational method that offers means to meet such challenges. In this workshop you will learn how to scrape unstructured web pages using rvest R package and prepare the captured data for analysis. You will gain some hands-on experience working on a few small projects that underlie common scraping strategies/issues. The last project will include scraping of multiple web pages.

Prerequisites: Functional knowledge of commonly used base R commands (for an overview see https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/base-r.pdf).

Note: Workshop participants will need to bring their own laptops, with R and RStudio installed prior to attending the workshop.

Text mining techniques can be applied to various data sources (e.g., newspaper articles, emails, online discussion posts, etc.) to efficiently extract useful data for different research purposes. For example, health science researchers may be interested in investigating a frequency of a particular disease name mentioned in a large set of newspaper articles. Educational researchers, on the other side, may wish to extract and categorize students' opinions from discussion forum in a high enrollment course. R offers a comprehensive set of functionalities for text mining. In this workshop, you will learn how to implement basic methods for preprocessing textual data, metadata management, a creation of term-document matrices over the collection of textual documents, sentiment analysis, text tokenization, word relationship extraction and text visualization.

Note: Workshop participants will need to bring their own laptops, with R and RStudio installed prior to attending the workshop.

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) provides authors with a unique numeric identifier to distinguish themselves from other researchers and automatically link their professional publications and activities. ORCID iDs persist throughout an author's scholarly career and ensure consistent, reliable attribution of their work.

Bring your laptop: this interactive workshop will cover the basics and benefits of getting started with ORCID. Participants will leave with an ORCID ID and an understanding of how to automatically keep their profile up-to-date. 

Graduate students are always encouraged to publish but often without really knowing what that means or how to start. This workshop will focus on navigating the peer review process and will also touch on the topics of open access, working with an editor, and co-authorship.  It will include a discussion of copyright transfer agreements and licenses and provide insight into publishing venues for assuring your research has the best possible visibility, accessibility, and impact.

A few questions this session will help to answer:

• How does the publishing cycle work?
• How can you assess potential publishing venues?
• What is peer review and how can you respond to reviewer comments?
• What rights can you retain to your published research?
• What are predatory publishers and how can you avoid them?

This multi-day boot camp is for SFU graduate students at both the PhD and Masters level, who are currently writing their thesis or dissertation.

Here's your opportunity to dedicate three days to making serious progress on your dissertation or master’s thesis. Along with a comfortable, quiet working environment, snacks and lunches, you will benefit from structured time, dedicated space, professional advising and peer support—all motivating factors in that final push towards completion of your dissertation or thesis.

Are you getting feedback that your writing is “choppy”? Are you overusing certain transitional words and phrases like “however” or “on the other hand”? Join today’s discussion on how to use transitions thoughtfully so that your reader can comprehend your writing with ease and clarity.

In this workshop, Tim Mossman will share his 20-minute PhD thesis presentation with Powerpoint.  Tim will first give his presentation (identity development of immigrant students) and then explain the techniques he used to design and deliver his presentation.  

Attendees will learn how to:

• choose a simple, attractive design,
• incorporate transitions, animations, and colorful images,
• use speaking notes effectively,
• use spoken signal phrases to transition between slides,
• and increase audience comprehension by speaking in message units.

Tim Mossman is the EAL Services Coordinator in the Student Learning Commons and former student in the Languages, Cultures, and Literacies program in the Faculty of Education.

Note:
Please note that this workshop is based on a PhD defence presentation of a qualitative research project in the Faculty of Education. Students should check with their own departments/disciplines regarding guidelines for thesis presentation formats first.

Graduate students are always encouraged to publish but often without really knowing what that means or how to start. This workshop will focus on navigating the peer review process and will also touch on the topics of open access, working with an editor, and co-authorship.  It will include a discussion of copyright transfer agreements and licenses and provide insight into publishing venues for assuring your research has the best possible visibility, accessibility, and impact.

A few questions this session will help to answer:

• How does the publishing cycle work?
• How can you assess potential publishing venues?
• What is peer review and how can you respond to reviewer comments?
• What rights can you retain to your published research?
• What are predatory publishers and how can you avoid them?

This workshop will begin with a discussion focused on how we can communicate the logical progression of our ideas. We will explore a number of ways to develop a clear, compelling, and logical argument from the beginning, through the middle, to the end of a piece of scholarly writing. Following this workshop is the Graduate Open Writing Lab; you are welcome to stay and work on your writing.

Your poster speaks for you! Learn how to capture your audience's attention, communicate the key aspects of your research and persuade your intended audience to reach out to you.

Being anxious about academic writing can lead to unhelpful writing habits like avoidance and procrastination. Join us for a discussion on how to make more progress by alleviating writing anxiety!

Lay language is needed in order to convey technical and advanced ideas in ways that are more effective than “dumbing it down”. You may be preparing a grant or fellowship proposal, writing for online purposes or fine tuning your “job talk”— all of which require you to translate your work and research to persons outside of your core field of study.

Our professors’ feedback can be one of the most valuable tools we receive as graduate students, leading to deeply meaningful change in our thinking and writing – if we can figure out what to do with it! Don’t let those teachable moments go to waste. Let’s talk about how we can improve incorporating (and accepting) others’ feedback into our writing process.

Drowning in words? We'll review how to recognize and cut wordiness and redundancy. By applying these strategies, you'll see immediate improvements in sentence clarity.

Presenting in graduate school, often in front of an academic audience, can be a very rewarding, but a somewhat anxiety-provoking experience. This interactive workshop will provide practical strategies to plan, organize, and structure a professional presentation that will increase your confidence and have you delivering an engaging presentation. You’ll learn the elements that contribute to an effective presentation and how to facilitate and field questions from your audience.

This multi-day boot camp is for SFU graduate students at both the PhD and Masters level, who are currently writing their thesis or dissertation.

Here's your opportunity to dedicate three days to making serious progress on your dissertation or master’s thesis. Along with a comfortable, quiet working environment, snacks and lunches, you will benefit from structured time, dedicated space, professional advising and peer support—all motivating factors in that final push towards completion of your dissertation or thesis.

This demonstration introduces you to the Thesis Submission process and the Thesis Template. It will begin with an introduction to required copyright permissions from the Copyright Office at SFU, followed by a review of the overall submission process (including deadlines and supporting documentation). Additionally, SFU Library's research data specialists will give instruction on how to preserve and, if appropriate, share research data for future uses.

The technical part of the workshop will follow, where you will be walked through the resources on the website and the functionality of the thesis template.

Students are encouraged to bring their own computer and thesis document(s) to work along with the facilitator during the workshop.

Learn how to:

• request copyright permissions
• write in the MS Word template-based file
• format your text using styles
• bring text in from other documents
• insert figures, images, and auto-numbered captions
• generate the Table of Contents, List of Tables, List of Figures, etc.

If you’ve begun writing, send your document to theses@sfu.ca in advance of the workshop; one might be used in demonstrating the Library’s thesis template. After the session, the formatted document will be returned in which the student can continue his/her work.