We offer guidance and resources to help researchers, students, and faculty effectively collect, access, and prepare data for analysis. Whether you need assistance identifying relevant datasets, navigating data repositories, acquiring proprietary or public data, or cleaning and formatting raw data, our experts are here to support your work.
We provide support in locating, evaluating, and obtaining research data from a variety of sources, including public repositories, institutional databases, and proprietary datasets, ensuring you have the right data for your research needs.
We can help you...
Cleaning data is a vital step in preparing it for analysis and involves a range of processes and decisions, from dealing with missing values to correcting errors or removing whitespace and special characters. We provide support for data wrangling and transformation tools as well as learning more about data cleaning and preparation.
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If you need to convert text from images into editable digital formats for analysis, we provide flatbed and overhead scanners [link to digitization page] along with support for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software.
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Would you like to introduce your students to resources for finding data, or to develop a course activity or assignment related to data wrangling? We provide curriculum support in a variety of ways for arts, humanities, social sciences, and STEM courses. Request a teaching consultation or class workshop related to any of our Data Acquisition and Preparation support areas by filling out the ULS instruction contact form.
We can help instructors...
Read more about Digital Scholarship and Publishing Instruction.
The Hillman Digital Scholarship Lab offers a range of specialized software to support data wrangling and preparation, including:
A reservable scanning and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) workstation is available just outside the Open Lab on the 1st floor of Hillman Library, which has specialized software installed, including:
The Digital Scholarship and Publishing team offers public workshops and instruction sessions by request. Upcoming events can be viewed here. We also facilitate communities of practice and host special events related to Data Acquisition and Preparation.
International Love Data Week is an annual celebration each February that connects researchers to data-related events and resources around the world. Hosted by the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), each year events are organized by participating institutions around a particular theme, encouraging us to reflect on ways that research data are collected and shared as well as ways we teach and implement best practices for working with research data. The ULS often hosts related workshops and special events throughout February – upcoming events can be viewed here!
