An overview of research data management requirements, practices, tools and support across the research data lifecycle. Research data or artefatcs are defined as items created, collected or observed in the course of producing original research, regardless of format. This introductory workshop is aimed at researchers, particularly those embarking on their research career or starting a new research project. Attendees will hear about policy, legal and ethical requirements, the FAIR, CARE and Maori Data Sovereignty principles, and develop strategies for data management planning, capturing, organising, sharing, and reusing research data.
Reviewing the literature is an important part of the research process. Organising relevant papers and findings are more than just data entry or bibliographic tasks, you also need to be able to analyse and integrate this material with the qualitative data you are gathering. This one-hour demonstration will provide an overview of NVivo’s functionality with regard to literature reviews. Importing and coding literature, running queries on published material, and working with bibliographic data in conjunction with your NVivo project will all be covered. This workshop is recorded.
Qualitative Methods
Introduction To Cleaning & Transforming Data With Openrefine
OpenRefine is a powerful, free, open-source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it; transforming it from one format into another; and extending it with web services and external data. This introductory, practical workshop will demonstrate how it can help you to: Understand the structure of a data set and resolve inconsistencies; Split data up into more granular parts; Match local data up to other data sets; Enhance a data set with data from other sources. Setup instructions can be found here
REDCap is used by researchers to create surveys or databases to collect and track information and research data, and schedule study events. It is ideal for sensitive research data, including personally identifiable data and consent. It supports different levels of access for collaborators, including from multiple sites and institutions, and tracking of data entry and revision history. REDCap enables online and offline data collection, data sovereignty obligations, and export of data into common software. It is used across the Aotearoa research community, including Universities, CRIs and Te Whatu Ora. Join us to hear about and see a demonstration of how this tool can help your research.
Open Access to publications and other research outputs ensures you get maximum exposure and recognition for your work. Open publications are viewed, downloaded, and cited at higher rates than closed publications. There are free ways to make your work open regardless of where you publish, so you don't have to publish in OA journals or pay steep publication fees to enjoy the benefits of OA. In this one-hour workshop you'll learn how to make your publications open for free while respecting copyright and publisher agreements.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Research Profiles: Increase discoverability, collaboration and funding opportunities
Are you new to research and want to establish your credibility as a researcher? Find out how creating an ORCID identifier and ORCID profile can be the beginning of establishing your career and reputation as a researcher. Learn about building good researcher profile habits which will improve the discoverability of your research and assist with networking with other researchers. Find out about the possible researcher profile options for new researchers and which ones will help when applying for funding opportunities or attracting the interest of recruiters for research roles.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Design 101: Presentations, Posters, And Powerpoints For Researchers
Why are you here? What are you presenting? Who are you presenting to? No, this is not the abstract for “Existentialism with Nietzsche”, it’s “Design 101: Presentations, Posters, and PowerPoints for Researchers”! Have you ever seen a research poster or a PowerPoint presentation that was truly terrible and thought, “Wow, I wonder how I could salvage that? I wonder how I can make research approachable through attractive design?” In this session, we will give you tips on what makes good visual design for research. We will walk you through the do’s (and some don’ts) and what to consider when putting together a visual research presentation, whether a poster, a PowerPoint slideshow, or another type of medium.
Programming skills are becoming more and more important for researchers to effectively collect, analyse, and translate data into publication-ready insights and figures. But it can be difficult to 'take the plunge' and learn those first steps. This practical, follow-along workshop is aimed at those who are completely new to programming, and introduces the R programming language for data analysis. Participants will learn about the most important concepts for starting with R, including setting up a project in R, basic programming principles, reading in data, summarising and subsetting data, and creating basic plots. We aim to give participants a brief overview of what is possible with R and to inspire them to continue learning. Participants will be expected to follow along and will be provided with set up instructions in advance, which must be completed before the workshop. For a slightly more in-depth look at plotting in R, see "Data Storytelling with R and ggplot", and for statistical analyses with R, see "Hands-on Statistical Analysis with R".
The Unix shell is a powerful tool that allows users to perform complex tasks, such as making a series of changes to a large number of images or text files, often with just a few keystrokes or lines of code. It helps users automate repetitive tasks and easily combine smaller tasks into larger, more powerful workflows. Use of the command line is often required to interact with High Performance Computing services such as those offered by NeSI, and it is used extensively in the the data manipulation workflows in some disciplines. This workshop will introduce you to this powerful tool so that you can apply it to your research work. The target audience is learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and the instructors prioritise creating a friendly environment to build confidence in research computing. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to create automated and reproducible workflows. For instance, after attending this workshop you will be able to navigate the filesystem, manipulate files, change the behaviour of commands with options and arguments, write scripts to perform actions on many files at once.
There's a lot more to NVivo than initially meets the eye! In this webinar we'll be showcasing our favourite features of NVivo including matrix coding queries, explore and comparison diagrams, and mind-maps. This session is perfect for researchers who are new to NVivo, as well as those who are familiar with the basics and curious to know what else is possible.This workshop is recorded.
Data Science
Qualitative Methods
What Is NeSI? New Zealand’s National High Performance Computers
The computational requirements of high impact research seems to grow further beyond what individual groups and institutions can reasonably provide every year. New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI) seeks to help meet these requirements for the New Zealand research community. In this talk we will go over the core services relating to high performance computing (HPC) that NeSI is able to provide, the reason why HPC might be suitable for your work, and how your research team can gain access to these resources.
Research Computing
High Performance Computing
Introduction To High Performance Computing With NeSI
A hands-on introduction to high performance computing (HPC) on a NeSI supercomputer. Members of the NeSI training team will guide attendees through HPC fundamentals including, software environment modules, scheduler use, profiling and scaling. Requirements: NeSI account, details provided after registration and closer to the event. We recommend you attend 'Introduction to the Command Line' or are already familiar with navigating a command line linux environment.
Economic, societal and environmental impact, or the 'non-academic' impact of research, is becoming an increasingly important part of the research ecosystem. It is standard practice for researchers to be asked by funders to describe the benefits of their research and how they might enable that benefit to be achieved. This session offers a high-level step-by-step guide on how to incorporate impact into your research planning.
Interested in learning how to use a suite of open-source tools to create interactive narratives and visualisations for your research? This session provides an overview of a range of free, easy-to-use tools from KnightLab useful for time or location-based narratives. Learn the basics and see how easy and fun it is to create a compelling StoryMap.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Resbaz Drop-In Clinic (Hackyhour)
Level: Beginner
Length: 1 hours
Capacity: 500
Note: This session is now full.
Open drop-in session to help with troubleshooting, getting help with installing session requirements, and any ResBaz questions. No registration required, just join via Zoom when the session starts.
Research Computing
Data Science
Visual Abstracts Create An Attention Hook To Your Published Article
Visual abstracts are a 'movie poster' of a journal article displayed on social media that hooks a viewer's attention to read your article. Like a 3-minute thesis is a verbal elevator pitch, a visual abstract is a pictorial summary understood in a 30-second glance. Designed with icons and keywords, they are simpler than a graphical abstract and quicker to make. Visual abstracts are a powerful thinking tool for yourself and a valuable communication tool to engage others. The first half of the session is an interactive exploration of visual abstracts to inspire your imagination. The second half of the session is an introductory level guided workshop to create a basic VA.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Research Collaboration And Reproducibility With Google Colab
Finding it challenging to collaborate with other researchers? Do you want to make your research as accessible and reproducible as possible? Google Colab is a hosted Jupyter notebook service that allows anybody to write and execute python code through the browser, while providing access free of charge to computing resources including GPUs. With a robust free tier, no installation or prerequisites, and a tonne of features, Google Colab can undoubtedly help you. This one-hour introductory workshop will demonstrate the most important features of Google Colab. Some UoA-specific topics will also be covered, such as how to mount your Google Drive or Dropbox so you can utilise your datasets and have your results saved automatically. This workshop's final section will showcase examples of how Google Colab is being used for research and education.
Data Science
Authoring Collaborative Research Projects In Quarto
Learn how to develop reproducible and sharable workflows using Quarto and Git. We will take you through how to host collaborative research projects as a formatted (and cool looking) HTML on GitHub. With some easy-to-learn version control and markdown syntax, research outputs can be shared as a live link that is consitent with your latest analyses. One benefit of Quarto is flexibility, accepting multiple programming languages (e.g. R, Python, Julia...) and output formats (e.g. docx, pdf, html...).
Many researchers approach statistical analyses with trepidation because they’re unsure about which analyses are appropriate for their data. This hands-on workshop introduces some important background statistical concepts, provides a simple workflow for deciding on which analyses are appropriate based on the kinds of variables you’re working with, and then demonstrates how to conduct these analyses in R. We will apply commonly used statistical analyses such as linear regression, independent-sample t-tests, and chi-squared tests, to R’s bult-in datasets. We will discuss the output and how we might present the results for publication. This workshop is aimed at attendees who already understand the basics of working with the R programming language, and who want to learn how to perform statistical tests in R. For an introduction to R for absolute beginners please see ‘Introduction to R & RStudio’ instead.
Python is a high-level general purpose programming language that is popular for working with research data owing to an active developer base and wide range of packages that can be leveraged for research. This comprehensive hands-on session will cover the fundamental building blocks of working with Python to analyse and visualize data. Together we'll interactively learn how to use Python to generate a plot from a csv file, getting to grips with the core functionality of the language along the way.
Led by the experts from Dropbox, this seminar is designed to help you make use of key features of this collaborative platform. Hosts will provide practical insights into how to effectively utilise Dropbox to improve collaboration, including how to manage files, share documents, and create teams, especially for those with institutional accounts (e.g. University of Auckland, University of Otago). Attendees will also learn about the latest features, including Transfer, Paper, Backup and how to use them to streamline workflows.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Researcher Skills And Career Planning For Academia And Beyond
Learn about the different capabilities and skills needed for a successful career in academia, tips for planning your career in academia, and what transferable skills academics possess which are relevant outside of academia.
Are you following security best practices? This is a tricky question and can vary widely depending on the technology you are using for your research. Additionally, security can be exceedingly difficult to implement effectively, while maintaining a balance between the level of security needed, and the effort required to implement and manage it. This talk will present security basics accompanied by some technical solutions researchers can implement to secure their cloud computing tools. We will introduce security controls and provide technical ways to implement these controls. For example, the use of network segmentation to secure systems, which can be accomplished in Nectar using private networks and security groups. Our primary cloud platform for demonstrations will be the Nectar Research Cloud - however, the techniques discussed will be transferable to other cloud platforms, such as AWS.
Are you working with code? Do you wish there was a neater way to keep an old copy of your code around, in case you still needed them? Do you need to collaborate with your colleagues? This workshop is for you! We will introduce Git, a version control system, for tracking changes on your local machine. We will also briefly touch on how to use GitHub as a remote repository. Git keeps track of changes to code and free us from the burden of keeping multiple files with increasingly long and complex filenames. Even though version control systems originated in the world of software development, they're just as useful when working with research projects. You can also connect to a remote repository like GitHub, which allows you to keep a backup of your code and its history, sync across your devices, and have powerful features for collaborating with your colleagues. If you're planning to write any kind of code during your research, it's highly recommended you understand and use version control systems like Git and remote repositories like GitHub to improve the way you work and collaborate (and to make it more enjoyable). This is a beginner-friendly workshop - participants will benefit from having some basic experience with a command-line, but this isn't required.
Research Computing
Navigating New Zealand’s Trusted-Research Protective Security Requirements (TR-PSR)
The session will breakdown the national TR-PSR policy framework into its key aspects and how this aims to prevent foreign interference and espionage within universities. The session is aimed at academic researchers and professional support staff and is intended to provide them with an understanding of how TR-PSR is being operationalised in a university setting. Attendees will be provided with specific references to available and upcoming resources (e.g., Universities New Zealand training modules).
Data Management Plans are a useful way of mapping out the collection, storage, analysis, and publication of research data. They surface important institutional or funder requirements, and ensure that project members are aware of their ethical and legal responsibilities when working with project data. This session will provide an overview of how Data Management Plans are a useful tool for researchers at all stages of their work, and in particular, when revisiting research data over time or onboarding new project members.
Qualitative Methods
Tikanga, Māori Research Ethics and Māori Data Sovereignty
All researchers are welcome to listen and contribute to this korero (discussion) about Tikanga, Māori Research Ethics and Māori Data Sovereignty within the context of undertaking research in Aotearoa. Our presenters will provide an introduction to the concepts and issues and why they are important to researchers. Attendees will be invited to respectfully ask questions and share their successful approaches to weaving Tikanga and Māori Data Sovereignty principles into how they conduct research.
Transcribing audio into text is part of the research process for many researchers. Manually transcribing text can be time consuming, so an increasing number of researchers are using software to transcribe, for example, interview or focus group audio recordings. Join us to hear about various transcription tools, selection considerations and a demonstration of OpenAI's Whisper - an automatic speech recognition system trained on a Large (multi-lingual) Language Model that can be run on a local computer or restricted access virtual machine.
Qualitative Methods
Artifical Intelligence
Health Care Data for Research at the University of Auckland
Please note this session is intended primarily for University of Auckland researchers. Administrative data are increasingly used to undertake research because of their considerable volume and variety and ability to be captured automatically, over time, and to be linked. Their use is not without challenges though. In this session, Katrina Poppe and Vanessa Selak draw on their use of New Zealand health care data for research to outline potential data sources, processes for access and data management and curation issues. They will briefly describe the recently established UoA Health Data Platform.
You don't need GIS software to do GIS! All the usual GIS manipulations of spatial data, whether 'vector' or 'raster', can be accomplished using tools within the R universe. This 2 hour practical workshop introduces geospatial data wrangling in R and is aimed at anyone who wants to organise, clean, or otherwise manipulate geospatial data, whether to make maps or to perform basic geographical analysis. Performing these tasks in R has the added benefit of making your workflows repeatable. Attendees will learn about key concepts, such as spatial buffering, detecting overlaps and intersections between spatial data layers, spatial joins, aggregation of raster data, clipping/cropping data, changing map projections, and geospatial file formats. They will be able to experiment with these operations using the ‘sf’ and ‘terra’ packages. Some familiarity with R and the tidyverse is assumed.
Visualising research data on maps is challenging, especially if you have no GIS experience. Fortunately, when using R you don’t need GIS experience to make compelling maps that tell a story. This 2 hour practical workshop introduces the basics of thematic map design using the ‘ggplot2’ and ‘tmap’ packages in R. It is aimed at anyone who needs to make maps but wants to avoid tangling with GIS software and stick to R tools they already know. Attendees will learn about key concepts such as geospatial file formats, map projections, and how visualization principles from the Grammar of Graphics apply to mapping. They will be able to experiment with changing the look of simple thematic maps in ggplot2 and tmap. Some familiarity with R and the tidyverse is assumed.
The web contains a treasure trove of useful research data, but extracting data manually is time consuming. Webscraping allows you to harvest data via a programming language across multiple pages fast, and convert it into a useable form for analyses. This 1 hour workshop provides a basic introduction to scraping tabular data from websites using the R programming language, and is aimed at beginner programmers with a small amount of experience using R, or those new to programming who’d like to understand what is possible with scraping. We’ll look at two examples: scraping a table from a Wikipedia page, and scraping a list of popular tv shows from the Internet Movie Database. We’ll then briefly look at how to automate the scraping of data using GitHub Actions, to allow the construction of a dataset over time. Attendees will come away with an understanding of how different tools and skills can be combined to get started with webscraping in R.
In today's research landscape, we are inundated with data. Effectively translating this data into actionable insights is crucial for informed decision-making. Understanding how data visualisations represent patterns and relationships can help you avoid misinterpretation and tell compelling data-driven stories. This workshop is aimed at those who want to create more bespoke plots for better communication of results. Although the base plot packages are powerful, they can become cumbersome when producing more complex plots. ggplot is based on the Grammar of Graphics framework and provides a structured way to construct basic and advanced plots. ggplot is a popular tool for data visualisation used by R and Python users. Participants will learn how to use ggplot to create custom plots that effectively communicate their data. They will gain hands-on experience around a participant-selected question and come away with a custom plot that answers that question. Participants should have a basic understanding of R, including the ability to run code and load data. Familiarity with selecting, filtering, and wrangling data is also recommended (and these topics are covered in ‘Introduction to R’).
Data Science
Unlocking the potential of the Stats NZ Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) for research
The Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) is a large research database holding de-identified microdata about people and households in New Zealand. The breadth of topics covered and the length of its timeseries make it a world-leading research database. Researchers use the IDI to study health, education, social services, justice, communities, population, income, housing, and the interactions between them. However, the very things that make the IDI a powerful tool for research can also make it a difficult environment for new researchers to begin working with. This workshop will introduce the IDI, explain how researchers are using it, and provide guidance to help new researchers get started. This workshop is aimed at anyone who is interested in hearing more about the IDI and how they might use it for research. Attendees will gain a better understanding of the sort of research possible with the IDI, how the data is accessed and protected, and useful tips and guidance from an experienced IDI user. Duration: 1 hour
Early-career researchers often dabble in various employment settings (e.g. academia, industry, government, etc.). While these circumstances are relatively common, individuals often describe feeling behind, out of place, unprepared, or confused about how to navigate career transitions. In this session, career consultants from the University of Auckland will teach you a search strategy to expand your awareness of what is possible. Rather than 4am doom scrolling on Seek, you will learn how to organize an employer-focused job search step-by-step, how to use LinkedIn to get a sense of what counts as ‘qualified’, and tips for what to expect in a professional job search. Attendees at all career stages and from all institutions are welcome.
Publications, Engagement & Impact
Unleashing Research Potential: An Overview of Powerful Computing Resources for Data Analysis
Are your data analyses crawling along on your personal computer? Ready to free up your workstation while accelerating your research? This workshop introduces New Zealand researchers to powerful computing solutions that can transform your analytical capabilities. Join us for a practical overview of cloud computing and High-Performance Computing (HPC) resources available nationwide, essential research computing concepts for researchers at any technical level, and hands-on introductions to Virtual Machines, Jupyter notebooks, and parallel processing techniques. We'll also cover specific pathways and services for University of Auckland researchers. Learn how to move beyond the limitations of your desktop and leverage institutional computing resources that can dramatically reduce processing time and expand your research possibilities. Suitable for researchers across all disciplines who work with computationally demanding data or models.
Wikipedia has become one of the most important free and open sources of knowledge, and it’s impossible to ignore the impact it has had on the internet and society as a whole. Researchers, and in particular doctoral candidates, can gain much from engaging with Wikipedia and its sister projects. This session will introduce Wikipedia and how it relates to the world of research. We will explore how researchers can engage with Wikipedia to increase their impact and boost their research metrics, while improving coverage and representation of topics that interest them. Attendees will learn how to edit existing pages, while following best practices. If you’d like to have a go during the workshop please create an account beforehand (click the ‘Create account’ link at the top right on any Wikipedia page. We recommend choosing an anonymous name, and adding your email so you can recover your account if you lose your password).
Literature reviews are an important part of setting the scene for your research, but it can be time-consuming to find and evaluate large numbers of sources. With the explosion of interest surrounding all things AI, many researchers are wondering how generative AI tools might be applied to reviewing the literature. In this session, we will examine how generative AI tools can be used at different stages in the literature review process. We will explore the capabilities and limitations of some readily available AI tools and discuss how they can support your searches. Finally, we’ll review some important considerations when choosing to use them in the research process.
Join this diverse panel who entered High Performance Computing (HPC) with no prior knowledge / background working with HPC / digital approaches in research. Facilitated by the Women in HPC Australasian Chapter, the panel will share their stories of what it was like to learn from scratch, what tips & tricks worked for them, and how they overcame challenges - championing the message that "anyone can be successful in this space". Women in HPC is a growing community of women and allies committed to advancing diversity and inclusion in HPC and research in our region. To learn more about the Chapter, visit https://tinyurl.com/whpcaunz
Peer review is a cornerstone of modern academic publishing practices, but researchers seldom receive any formal training on how to actually do it. This workshop provides an introduction to essential peer review skills, and a template to guide you on your way to producing useful peer reviews. It is aimed at published researchers who have started to receive review requests from journals or colleagues. Attendees will learn about the general peer review process, and how to write fair, constructive, and actionable reviews of others' work. Improving your peer review skills will also improve your own writing skills, and help you to think about your own work from the perspective of a peer reviewer.
Researchers are encouraged to span disciplines and collaborate with other researchers outside their institutions or countries, but it can be difficult to share sensitive research data between members of a research team while also complying with privacy and data security requirements. Join this session to hear about important legal and ethical considerations when handling sensitive data, including personally identifiable data. We'll explore best practices for sharing sensitive research data, including encrypted sharing or transfer methods. Presenters will demonstrate how you and your collaborators can use the NZ/Aotearoa-based FileSender to share encrypted files securely, and we'll provide you with some recommended practices to optimise your data transfers.
Research Computing
Cybersecurity
Working With Personally Identifiable Research Data
Working with personally identifiable information is common across many research disciplines and methodologies, but it comes with important considerations for privacy and data security. This session will provide an overview of the legal, ethical and policy requirements and best practices for working with personally identifiable data. We'll define the elements that can make data personally identifiable and how this is evolving with new technologies. The presenters will explore moving data across the spectrum of identifiable to deidentified to confidentialised, in the NZ context, in order to comply with a broad range of requirements and make it easier to work with the data.
Qualitative Methods
Cybersecurity
Supercharge Your Research: Unlocking AI's Hidden Potential Through Prompt Engineering
Artificial Intelligence tools offer unprecedented support for researchers, but most users capture only a fraction of their capabilities. Prompt engineering is the art of crafting effective instructions for AI systems. Effective prompt engineering can support generating nuanced insights, solving complex problems, and accelerating your research workflow. This 1-hour workshop introduces prompt engineering techniques specifically tailored for academic research contexts. Designed for complete beginners with no prior AI experience, participants will engage in hands-on activities using multiple AI tools including Google's AI Data Science Assistant, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude to understand how different prompt structures yield dramatically different results. We'll explore three research-focused examples across disciplines: qualitative research analysis and positionality reflection, health data visualisation, and coding solutions for quantitative analysis. Attendees will leave with a clear understanding of prompt engineering fundamentals, practical strategies for crafting effective prompts in various research contexts, hands-on experience with multiple AI tools, and knowledge of responsible AI integration including ethical considerations and appropriate tool selection for academic research.
This talk will cover the basics how of longitudinal or repeated data may be captured using a variety of tools within REDCap. We’ll start with an introduction of the underlying data structures, then cover the use of events and repeating forms, and how to export the data in a way that simplifies the analysis to be undertaken.
Qualitative Methods
How NeSI’s Consultancy Service Can Help Your Research
Learn how NeSI’s Research Software Engineering consultancy service is helping researchers tackle complex computational challenges. In this session, Chris Scott will share recent case studies highlighting the service's impact, followed by an open discussion to explore how your research could benefit. Whether you're curious about HPC, seeking support for your next project, or just want to connect.
Research Computing
High Performance Computing
When science meets the headlines: Media engagement for research impact
Have you got a big paper coming out that you think is newsworthy? The Science Media Centre can help you get journalists’ attention. This session will introduce you to Scimex - our online portal for promoting embargoed research to registered journalists - alongside our other tools and resources for media engagement. You will learn some tips and tricks on what to do when a journalist calls, and how to ensure your expertise has impact.
The number of research papers published each year continues to grow, and the number of journals grows along with it. Selecting a publication venue for your work is worth considering from the very start of your project, and especially when you first start to write your manuscript, because it will influence the narrative you craft and the conventions you use. This session offers researchers of all levels a practical set of strategies for discovering and evaluating academic journals to ensure the right fit for your research and to maximise your impact. We'll consider which factors determine the quality of a journal and what sets them apart from each other. We'll also cover related topics like how to spot predatory journals, the importance of metrics, and how to check if a journal is covered by an open access agreement for your institution.