Tag Archives: tools

A Little of This, A Little of That

30 Oct

I’ve been out and about and busy juggling many things this month – library conferences, speaking engagements, and day-to-day work. All of it finds me neglecting my poor blog. Let’s see if I can’t remedy that a bit today. Continuing with the theme I began with my last post, here are some great finds that I’ve come across over the past weeks:

Rob Peterson of Dun and Bradstreet offered a nice blog post last month, highlighting 14 Data Visualization Tools to Tell Better Stories with Numbers. It provides a concise overview of which type of visualization is best for the job, along with links to online tools for each. Remember, if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Keep more than one tool in your toolbox.

I’ve printed off the instructions for How to Make a Timeline from a Google Spreadsheet. They’ve been sitting on my desk for weeks, but I know I’ll find the time(line) to give it a try. Timelines can be such a wonderful way to tell a story.

Print Friendly was recommended to me via some blog and/or list that I follow. I’ve discovered that I use it so very often since. It’s terrific for printing out webpages without all of the ads and photos and whatnot. If you must print, it offers a greener way of doing so.

Thanks to the great folks at both UMass Amherst and UConn, plus the Boston Library Consortium, I was finally able to attend a hands-on workshop on Tableau. I tried unsuccessfully to teach myself how to use it for awhile. (This is due more to my lack of time and focus than on any of Tableau’s tutorials and help guides.) I knew that I’d like it, if I got around to using it. And yesterday, I published my first test visualizations. Woot!!

The American Society of Cell Biology recently shared an article about NIH’s new tool to calculate Relative Citation Ratio. iCite allows users to compare citations, offering an alternative (read, better) to the standard journal impact factor. It’s nice to see NIH supporting the idea that the measure(s) of research impact are broader than we’ve long accepted.

I’m a big fan of Shaun Usher and his projects, “Lists of Note,” “Letters of Note,” and “LetterHeady.” While perusing his site recently, I came across the collection of videos called, “Letters Live.” The art of letter writing is sadly fading, but its beauty thankfully revisited through this wonderful collection of actors reading the correspondence of the famous and infamous. Enjoy!

One of the library conferences that I attended this month was the annual meeting of the North Atlantic Health Sciences Libraries (NAHSL). I was on the planning committee for the conference and one thing that I decided, on a whim, to do was create NAHSL BINGO, a game that attendees could play throughout the meeting. It was filled with typical sightings and/or sayings one sees/hears during these events (knitters? cell phones going off? someone complaining about the room’s temperature?). To create the cards, I Googled “bingo card generator” and found a great one here. Bookmark it for fun and games emergencies.

At that same meeting, perhaps one of the biggest audience gasps came when the librarians from Yale University’s medical library unveiled their brand spanking new tool to help the poor soul tackling systematic reviews … the Yale MeSH Analyzer. Geeky librarian souls, rejoice in its awesomeness.

My Desk

Lastly, this week’s What’s On My Desk Right Now? Nathan Yau’s, Data Points; Charles Wheelan’s, Naked Statistics; Albert Cairo’s, The Functional Art; Dona Wong’s, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics; and the hot-off-the-press The Very Best American Infographics of 2015, edited by Gareth Cook. Oh, and a drawing of a bunny that I doodled while on a lengthy conference call a few weeks back. Sense a theme?

Until next time… doodle on!

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First Day of School

5 Sep

September 4, 2012

This isn’t my first day meeting with the team. We met to collaborate on the grant proposal, of course, and I’ve met with several team members here and there over the past month, but today marked the official beginning of my time on the project. You can probably guess what it started with… as with most anything at work, it started with a meeting. Two of them, in fact.

First, was the monthly meeting where many of the people involved (there are approximately 25 people across 4-5 campuses and/or institutions working on this study!) either attend in person or call in. It’s an update call, a time to document the progress on everything from the number of participants recruited and/or interviewed, to the number of glitches in the various computer programs fixed.

Mostly, it is a time for Process Evaluation. This is an important term, I quickly learn. A large research study is continually evaluated to insure that each step, each part, is producing the data required to ultimately answer the research question. In this case, the National Cancer Institute is giving the researchers a substantial amount of money over several years to investigate what type of intervention works best and is the most cost-effective to insure that women get mammograms, a proven measure in the early discovery and treatment of breast cancer. Without the correct data, the question will go unanswered – or worse, answered incorrectly.

For me, the interesting aspect of the emphasis on process evaluation is that it is the reason the PIs were most excited about adding an informationist to their team. With multiple people and multiple sources of data involved in the study, communication – or better put, troubles with it – are a big concern. My first, and perhaps primary, role on the team is to discover, create and implement the tools necessary to decrease these miscommunications. People are using different terms to describe the same thing. Variables lack clear definitions. We need some controlled vocabulary. Now there’s a good librarian word! And with it, I can see my value pretty quickly.

Meeting #2 involves talking about this role more specifically. My first task is spelled out, “Create for us a Data Dictionary.” Fortunately, I have about 10 months to do this, but by next week, I’m to present my ideas on how I’m going to do this. What am I going to create? What software might I need? What will work best?

I spend the rest of my day thinking about this. I read the grant proposal again. I read a published paper on the study. I sketch out a picture of the methodology, trying to figure out when and where each data source comes into play. It’s no easy task. We have 4-6 (depending on who’s describing it to me) sources of data; 4-6 codebooks; countless variables in total. And of course, they are interconnected in countless ways.

In the end, I determine that I need to make something interactive, something that will allow the users to see not only the definitions of the variables, but also where and how they relate to others. A static document won’t do. I wish I had the programming chops to use ThinkMap (the software behind the Visual Thesaurus), but lacking that, I take time reviewing some other mind mapping and/or visualizing tools. I download a free trial of MindJet and play around with it for awhile. This might work, but I’m not ready to recommend it yet. There are other things out there, I know. I need to look at them, too.

Bottom line: This first day of class was WAY more than a “just hand out the syllabus and leave” day. I think I deserve a new pencil!

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