Fall 2015

This four day course (August 19-22 2015) located in Faido, Switzerland gives an introduction to handle large datasets in an Ecological context. Data Carpentry is a spin-off of the wider known Software Carpentry and dedicated to teach basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data. Their objective is that researchers are able to retrieve, view, manipulate, analyze and store their's and other's data in an open and reproducible way. Because researchers learn best when material is taught in their domain, the workshop will be tailored towards biologists with domain-specific examples and data. They previously held introductory workshops for biology that cover topics such as working more effectively with spreadsheets, using SQL for data management, and analyzing data with R and command-line tools.

The lead instructor of the workshop, Dr. Karthik Ram from the University of California in Davis is also member of the ROpenSci group, which creates APIs to several online data repositories and databases and will potentially introduce some of these packages, web scraping and open science in general.

The graduate school is funded through SUK-Programm "Doktoratsprogramme".

Data sets will be provided but the participants are encouraged to bring their own data. Basic knowledge in R is required. Participants should bring their own laptop with the latest version of R installed. Active participation during the course is required to obtain the credit points.