Data Science

Command Line Fundamentals

February 11, 2025, 10:00am
In this workshop, we provide a basic introduction to how to interact with your computer via terminal. We are going to focus on Bash (Bourne-Again Shell) or Zsh (Z Shell), which are one of the most commonly used Unix/Linux shells.

R Copilot Assisted Coding Workshop

February 4, 2025, 10:00am
This workshop provides a beginner-friendly introduction to coding with GitHub Copilot, a popular AI coding assistant. We will start from the basics so you can take advantage of AI assistants to improve your coding and avoid common pitfalls. First, we’ll cover how to install and set-up Visual Studio Code, a free code editor through which we will use GitHub Copilot. Then, we will go through the different features of GitHub Copilot and how to use them to help us code in R.

Fritz_X_DargesBlue42… Who Are You?

January 14, 2025
Jonathan Pérez
by Jonathan Pérez. Reflecting on the complexities of the human experience is paramount to conducting research. Jonathan Pérez, through his exploration of a conspiracy subreddit, reflects on his experience trying to find the human behind the datum. Jonathan critiques the harmful effects of dehumanizing rhetoric and the researcher’s responsibility to navigate ethical implications. In doing so, he establishes three guiding rules to support researchers seeking to humanize their analysis: 1) a researcher must always find the story behind the data; 2) a researcher must protect themselves; 3) a researcher must still humanize participants (even those who perpetuate harmful narratives).

Finley Golightly

IT Support & Helpdesk Supervisor
Applied Mathematics

Finley joined D-Lab as full-time staff launching their career in Data Science after graduating with a Bachelor's degree in Applied Math from UC Berkeley.

They have been with D-Lab since Fall 2020, formerly as part of the UTech Management team before joining as full-time staff in Fall 2023. They love the learning environment of D-Lab and their favorite part of the job is their co-workers! In their free time, they enjoy reading, boxing, listening to music, and playing Dungeons & Dragons. Feel free to stop by the front desk to ask them any questions or...

Tom van Nuenen, Ph.D.

Data/Research Scientist, Senior Consultant, and Senior Instructor
D-Lab
Social Sciences
Digital Humanities

I work as a Lecturer, Data Scientist, and Senior Consultant at UC Berkeley's D-Lab. I lead the curriculum design for D-Lab’s data science workshop portfolio, as well as the Digital Humanities Summer Program at Berkeley.

Former research projects include a Research Associate position in the ‘Discovering and Attesting Digital Discrimination’ project at King’s College London (2019-2022) and a researcher-in-residence role for the UK’s National Research Centre on Privacy, Harm Reduction, and Adversarial Influence Online (2022). My research uses Natural Language Processing methods to...

Institutional Review Board (IRB) Fundamentals

February 18, 2025, 9:00am
Are you starting a research project at UC Berkeley that involves human subjects? If so, one of the first steps you will need to take is getting IRB approval.

R Fundamentals: Parts 1-4

May 5, 2025, 10:00am
This workshop is a four-part introductory series that will teach you R from scratch with clear introductions, concise examples, and support documents. You will learn how to download and install the open-sourced R Studio software, understand data and basic manipulations, import and subset data, explore and visualize data, and understand the basics of automation in the form of loops and functions. After completion of this workshop you will have a foundational understanding to create, organize, and utilize workflows for your personal research.

Python Web Scraping

March 5, 2025, 10:00am
In this workshop, we cover how to scrape data from the web using Python. Web scraping involves downloading a webpage's source code and sifting through the material to extract desired data.

Python Web APIs

March 3, 2025, 10:00am
In this workshop, we cover how to extract data from the web with APIs using Python. APIs are often official services offered by companies and other entities, which allow you to directly query their servers in order to retrieve their data. Platforms like The New York Times, Twitter and Reddit offer APIs to retrieve data.

Python Machine Learning Fundamentals: Parts 1-2

April 8, 2025, 12:00pm
This workshop introduces students to scikit-learn, the popular machine learning library in Python, as well as the auto-ML library built on top of scikit-learn, TPOT. The focus will be on scikit-learn syntax and available tools to apply machine learning algorithms to datasets. No theory instruction will be provided.