EucXylo members participate in Data Carpentry workshop

Post authored by Postdoctoral Research Fellow Kim Martin

Over 20 eager AgriScience researchers (including EucXylo M.Sc. Candidate Lucy Nevhungwili) were treated to a 4-day Data Carpentry workshop last week, hosted by RSE@SUN and Dr Jan Greyling of the AgroInformatics Initiative at Stellenbosch University.

A senior Research Software Engineer (RSE) from Newcastle University – Dr Jannetta Steyn – demonstrated the use of OpenRefine for cleaning and preparing data for analysis.

EucXylo Ph.D. Candidate Mpilo Khumalo presented instructional material on the R Programming Language (focusing on manipulating data using the tidyverse framework, and visualising results with ggplot).

EucXylo Postdoctoral Research Fellow Dr Kim Martin introduced attendees to version control with Git, and demonstrated the use of the GitHub cloud platform and associated desktop software to collaboratively manage data analysis code (including publishing the results as a simple website via GitHub).

Feedback was extremely positive (including some unsolicited feedback on LinkedIn!); it is clear that there is great demand and value for such skills among researchers in AgriScience.