Data – Page 3 – The Distant Librarian

Review: A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing

Jan 17, 2019

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We've been doing a lot of talking about Data Management Plans at MPOW, and I recently came across the following article from PLOS One: A funder-imposed data publication requirement seldom inspired data sharing. In it, the authors take a look at 315 research projects that had been funded by the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee…

Archive of tweets from Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) 2018

Nov 30, 2018

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Discovery, Scholarship, Social Networks

Here is an archive of tweets from this year's Semantic Web in Libraries (SWIB) conference. You can search and filter the results here, and explore nifty visualizations here. All this courtesy of the excellent (and free) TAGS project.

Google enters the data discovery game

Sep 5, 2018

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Discovery

I first read about it on Reddit, followed shortly by the CANLIB-DATA Listserv, but as of today Google has a new search engine dedicated to research data sets, the cleverly-named Google Dataset Search. The good: Surfacing this stuff is great! Google is using schema.org to discover stuff, and has a pretty extensive page on how…

An introduction to cancer (excluding Quebec)

Jun 15, 2018

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Miscellaneous

I subscribe to The Daily, from Statistics Canada, and was intrigued earlier this week when they announced that Canadian Cancer Statistics 2018 would be released the following day. This was the first time I remembered seeing StatsCan announce that something would be released, rather than that something had been released. Also, I couldn't recall a…

Installing Extensions in Open Refine – note to self: RTFM

Dec 14, 2017

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Miscellaneous, Tutorials, Web/Tech

One of my all-time favourite open source tools is Open Refine, which "is a powerful tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data." Today I'm talking about that extending bit. One of the nice features of Open Refine is…

Hydrator is my new favourite tool to hydrate tweet-ids (aka so many tools!)

Feb 3, 2017

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Scholarship, Social Networks, Web/Tech

Update – April 18, 2023: From the developer: Twitter's changes to their API which greatly reduce the amount of read-only access means that the Hydrator is no longer a useful application. The application keys, which functioned for the last 7 years, have been rescinded by Twitter. For the past couple of weeks I've been helping…

Archive of tweets from Semantic Web in Libraries (swib) 2016

Dec 8, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Discovery, Scholarship, Social Networks

As I did last year, I have captured all the tweets from this year's Semantic Web in Libraries conference using the TAGS tool for Google Sheets. As of this posting there are 630 tweets with the hashtag #SWIB, 573 of them unique. Last year had 1,736 tweets! with 1,633 of them unique. Here's the archive…

Before and After – Calgary and Ft. McMurray

Dec 1, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Ideas, Maps, Tutorials, Web/Tech

The other day Google Earth released updated historical imagery, so I thought it’d be neat to take a peek at two spots I know have grown a lot since 1985, the date of the earliest imagery. I also wanted a quick and dirty way to make a before/after image slider, as shown on the above…

Alberta Open Data Developments

Nov 29, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Scholarship

Yesterday was a pretty good day for Open Data in Alberta. First, the City of Calgary went live with a Socrata version of their Open Data portal. Previously they had been running on some sort of Microsoft SharePoint (my guess) site, and it was not a particularly pretty or useful thing. Really looking forward to…

Mita makes the case: Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities

Nov 17, 2016

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Paul R. Pival

in Data, Discovery, Scholarship, Service, Web/Tech

Mita Williams has an excellent blog post titled Why Libraries Should Maintain the Open Data of Their Communities. It's a long (for a blog post), but important read, and includes an excellent history of how Canadian government data has evolved, and how it compares (poorly) to US government data . I've been making the same…

Category: Data