Blog post

Exploring The Oakland Area Through Data

March 10, 2020

A project that uses many tools that are taught at the D-Lab, and on which I’m excited to be working with students, focuses on exploring the city of Oakland, CA through spatial data.

WHY DO I FIND THIS INTERESTING?

One project that I’ve been working on with a student (CS major, ERG minor) is the exploration of environmental justice and transportation in the City of Oakland, CA.

It’s really cool to get to know our neighboring city by exploring the multiple data sets available, and then being able to walk through those spots that...

Data and Tools for Mapping COVID-19

April 28, 2020

Since the early days of the COVID-19 crisis (the past few months!), the spatial and temporal enormity of the situation has been tellingly conveyed in mapped data visualizations. The most compelling maps, in my opinion, have been those created by the New York Times ….

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Manuscript Workflow with R Markdown and GIT

March 16, 2021

As part of my Masters of Public Health program I needed to complete a capstone. Working on a manuscript is a lot of back and forth: You need to make edits, fix your words and figures, and sometimes re-work entire sections. If you are like me, the thought of doing this process over a long period of time in Word makes me nauseous. Two main issues that cause this nausea for me are:

I frequently forget to make a record of my writing and often overwrite work

Copying and pasting figures while arguing with Word’s formatting...

Howdy Neighbor! Proximity Analysis in R

March 1, 2021

Proximity analysis is one of the cornerstones of spatial analysis. It refers to the ways in which we use spatial methods to ask "what is happening near here". It is at the heart of the Tobler's first law of geography which I paraphrase as "Everything is related but near things are more related." In practice, proximity analysis...

The Pressure to be Productive Amidst Reigning Chaos

April 14, 2020

After more than two weeks following the shelter in place guidelines, I have developed some sort of a routine. That is the only way I can get myself to do any work. As a graduate student, I feel the pressure to be productive even in the middle of a pandemic. My most productive hours usually occur between 7am and 2pm. I have never tried to understand why that is the case. However, since being confined to my apartment, I have been unable to work at the same level of efficiency even during my golden hours.

Some investigation into this lack of productivity has led me to realise that my...

Improved Data Protection Features for Berkeley Qualtrics Users

October 14, 2020

D-Lab has long been a champion of campus qualtrics users by hosting workshops and supporting consulting requests. We have some updates that we would like to share with you regarding some changes to the campuswide qualtrics brand that might affect your surveys.

NEW PROTECTED DATA FEATURE ON ALL BERKELEY QUALTRICS PLATFORMS

In order to ensure compliance with UC privacy and ...

Projects as a Learning Tool

April 6, 2021

Let’s say you’re new to programming, or maybe you’ve coded before but you’re tackling a new concept. You’ve read a blog post or taken a workshop, and have a general sense of what is going on. But how do you take this to the next level? One of my favorite ways to dive into a new technique is to simply try it out.

With coding, learning by doing is one of the best ways to improve. When I started learning Python, I took a class where I did homework assignments involving coding small games and algorithms. While these were useful for general coding, I wanted to dig in to the...

The Surprising Role of Digital Technology During the Covid-19 Pandemic

March 31, 2020

Many of us were already using our phones for the majority of our waking hours, but during the current shelter-in-place-measures, digital technology has become more important than ever.

Now that we are unable to engage in face-to-face contact, remote communication through our personal digital devices, such as our smartphones, is essential for staying connected with friends, family and co-workers.

I would like to highlight three other ways that our digital devices could have a...

Cultural Analytics Learning Institute for Digital Humanities

March 2, 2021

Are you interested in developing transferable competencies that are attractive to employers and academic programs? The digital and data revolutions have transformed our world. In our digital humanities program, the UC Berkeley Cultural Analytics Learning Institute for Digital Humanities (CALI-DH), you will explore questions about art and culture using digital tools. By pairing computational methods and domain specialization you can better understand complex phenomena and cultures and how computational analysis influences what you see. ...

The Importance of Design Plans for Data Science

April 20, 2021

Since becoming a Data Fellow at the D-Lab, I have had the opportunity to assist many talented social scientists through the D-Lab’s Consulting service. A regular consulting request is to help with the research design for a new project. These requests are understandable. For empirical researchers, a high-quality research design makes or breaks a research project. In this post, I suggest a few benefits of writing a skeleton design plan before writing any code whatsoever.

One of the exciting aspects...