Date: November 16-19, 2020
Application deadline is Monday October 19, 2020, 5:00 pm (Beirut time)
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS), through its Arab Public Data Archive initiative, is pleased to announce a four-day online workshop on “Data Management and Sharing for the Social Sciences” co-organized with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The workshop will be held online from November 16 to 19, 2020, and is designed for early career researchers and research support staff in the social sciences. The workshop aims to enable participants to manage their research data and shows the pathway and best practices towards data sharing. Practical exercises in data cleaning and analysis with spreadsheets and in OpenRefine enable participants to manage large and complex data and to create tidy and reusable datasets fit for publication.
The benefits of making data open and accessible have been widely discussed within the academic and public policy communities. Sharing research data enables others to verify and build upon published results, supports transparency and accountability of research findings, increases the return on public investments in research, encourages new scientific innovations, and facilitates collaboration within and across disciplines. However, there are real challenges associated with sharing data with the broader community. Fortunately, many of these challenges can be overcome with careful data management planning and implementation.
Workshop Objectives
The workshop will examine the opportunities and challenges of creating and sharing high-quality data resources. Workshop participants will learn about:
- The benefits of research data management and the publication of FAIR data (that is they meet the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) and open datasets to both the individual researcher and to the scientific enterprise as a whole;
- The complexities of research data based on disciplinary context, format, technical requirements, and applicable policies;
- The implementation of data management standards and best practices across the research data lifecycle to produce and share high-quality datasets;
- Drafting a research data management plan with real live examples;
- The principles underlying tidy and machine readable data;
- Cleaning and preparing datasets for analysis on a practical level with spreadsheets and OpenRefine;
- Applications for archiving research data for long-term preservation, discovery, access, and reuse.
Workshop Format
- The four-day training workshop will be held online and in English
- Training will be from 11:00 am until 7:00 pm (Beirut time)
- Participants are expected to fully participate in all sessions
- The training will include synchronous learning with supplemental exercises done independently or in small breakout groups
- Participants will be awarded an ACSS-Odum Institute certificate upon successful completion of the workshop
Tentative Training Workshop Agenda
*Individual learning sessions include break times at participants’ leisure*
The Trainers
Thu-Mai Christian is the Assistant Director for Archives at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She leads the day-to-day operations of the Odum Institute Data Archive while establishing and enforcing policies in accordance with archival standards and best practice.
As co-chair of the Research Data Alliance CURE-FAIR working group, she has been working to promote standards and best practices for curating data, code, and other research artifacts that meet high-quality standards that support research reproducibility.
Thu-Mai received her M.S. in Information Science with a concentration in Archives and Records Management and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Information and Library Science from the University of North Carolina. Her research is focused on policies and practices that support scientific reproducibility.
Dalal Rahme has over 11 years of experience in academic libraries. She received her M.S. in Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2014 with a specialization in the Data Curation and Socio-Technical Data Analytics.
She currently holds the position of data services librarian at the American University of Beirut (AUB), where she assists in the curation of data for different projects, delivers training and workshops related to data literacy, data management, data curation and data visualization, and helps in administering the institutional repository at AUB. She is also an instructor at the Graduate School of Information Science at the Lebanese Public University where she teaches digital preservation and data curation since 2015 and an instructor at the Library Juice Academy where she teaches a Data Management course.
Armin Straube is a Teaching Fellow in Library and Information Studies at UCL Qatar. Before joining UCL he worked as Head of Data Curation at Qatar National Library and as manager of nestor (the German Network for Digital Preservation) at German National Library.
He was involved in a number of projects in the wider cultural domain, contributing to digitization efforts, the standardisation and enrichment of descriptive metadata and the development of data models and metadata exchange formats. His experience includes consultancy and teaching assignments in the area of records management, digital archives and research data.
Armin holds master degrees in history (University Hagen, Germany), in geography (University Halle, Germany) and in archives and records management (University College Dublin, Ireland). His research interests focus on research data curation and digital preservation.
Eligibility Guidelines
Applicants must:
- Be citizens of an Arab League member state or nationals of an Arab country (defined as long-term residents, even if they do not hold citizenship as in the case of refugees or stateless residents)
- Reside in the Arab region.
- Have at least intermediate level proficiency in English, as the workshop will be conducted in English
- Have a minimum of a Master’s degree in social science or related field (Economics, Political Science, Development Studies, Statistics, Computer Sciences, Library and Information Sciences, etc) or Bachelor’s degree with relevant work experience in social science data.
Application Process and Selection
Applicants are required to apply online by sending the following (in English) to assm@theacss.org noting “ACSS/Odum training workshop” in the subject line.
- CV/Resume. The following should be included in the CV/Resume: Citizenship, Level of highest degree (Doctoral, Masters, Bachelor), Field of study, Job title, Name and Country of current employing institution, Current field of work.
- Motivation Letter. The letter should describe how the applicant’s current work relates to the training and how the knowledge/skills learned during the training workshop may be applied at work (200 words maximum)
Application deadline is Monday October 19, 2020, 5:00 pm (Beirut time)
The selection committee is comprised of staff members from ACSS and faculty of the Odum Institute who will review applications based on the following criteria:
- Relevance of current position
- Academic qualifications
- Language proficiency
By submitting the electronic application, applicants affirm that they agree, without any objections, to the evaluation and selection results as decided and announced by the selection committee and ACSS. All decisions made by the selection committee are final.
Accepted Applicants
Accepted applicants are expected to:
- Provide their own computer with internet access and spreadsheet software (Excel, Google Sheets, Libreoffice Calc etc.), have or are able to install the free software OpenRefine, and download the exercise dataset in advance.
- Participate in online activities on Moodle and upload evidence of their completion of assignments
- Participate fully and attend all sessions of the workshop
Please direct all queries to assm@theacss.org noting “ACSS/Odum online training” in the subject line.
__________________________________________________________________________________
About the Arab Council for the Social Sciences
The Arab Council for the Social Sciences (ACSS) is a regional, independent, non-profit organization headquartered in Beirut, Lebanon. The ACSS works across the Arab region as well as globally. It aims to promote and support the social sciences throughout the 22 countries in the Arab region by providing funding, training, mentorship, publications and networking opportunities. It seeks to achieve this objective by promoting quality research in the region; establishing networks of knowledge production; enhancing research collaborations regionally, cross-regionally and globally; disseminating, validating and utilizing the produced knowledge; and providing a model for academic excellence and professional standards in the region. For more information, please visit http://www.theacss.org.
About the Odum Institute
Founded in 1924, the Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in the Social Sciences supports the social science teaching and research mission at UNC. The Institute provides a range of consulting services on quantitative and qualitative methods, GIS and spatial analysis, survey research, and data management. Odum offers workshops, summer courses, and a graduate certificate program. For more information, please visit http://odum.unc.edu.
About the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
UNC-Chapel Hill, founded in 1789 as the first public university in the United States, is a global higher education leader known for innovative teaching, research and public service. A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the University offers 78 Bachelor’s, 112 Master’s, 68 Doctorate and seven professional degree programs. For more information, please visit http://www.unc.edu.
__________________________________________________________________________________