Today on the blog, I’m going to talk about the difference between a bar chart (right-left bars) and a column chart (up-down bars). For many, the difference seems negligible — simply the direction of the bars — but the choice … Continue reading →
Author: Kristin Briney
File Formats
Every once and a while, I run across a topic and think, “surely I’ve covered this one my blog?” The most recent of these topics, which came up when I wrote December’s Exit Strategy post, concerns file formats. File formats … Continue reading →
Eating Our Own Carrot Sticks
One phrase that’s bound to come up at every data management conference is “carrot versus stick” vis-a-vis incentivizing researchers to manage their data better. Carrots are rewards for good practices and sticks are requirements and their consequences relating to data … Continue reading →
The Long List of Data Management Books
There was a long discussion on twitter yesterday (okay, I went on a rant) about the vast number of data management books that have been published for librarians in the past few years. While not exclusively data management books for librarians, … Continue reading →
It’s My 5-Year Blogiversary!
It is the 5-year anniversary of me starting this blog! I can’t believe that it’s already been 5 years. How did that happen?! I put up my very first post on 2013-02-20: The Blog I Wish I Had A lot … Continue reading →
Wrapping Up a Project, Part 2
Twice in the month of January, I had to find files from an old project. With resignation, I delved into old folders only to find that, wow, there’s a “FinalDocuments” subfolder with everything I need all laid out for me … Continue reading →
Gaining Competency in Data Visualization
I couldn’t be more excited that my latest journal article, “Gaining Competency: Learning to Teach Data Visualization,” was just published in the Journal of eScience Librarianship. The idea behind the paper is: how do we as librarians teach data skills … Continue reading →
Exit Stage Left
Have you ever fallen down a research rabbit hole? It does not happen to me very often (thankfully) but when it does, I fall deep. All of this is to say that I’m back from my 5-month blogging hiatus. I … Continue reading →
Two Strategies for Working with Dates in Excel
One of the periodic discussions that comes up as a data management evangelist (beside the “data is” v. “data are” debate) is about how Excel is terrible with dates. Excel mangles dates, mangles non-date data into dates, and doesn’t play nice … Continue reading →
Data Privacy/Security Is Not An Afterthought
I’m currently doing a lot of reading for an upcoming presentation at the American Library Association annual meeting on learning analytics, library patron privacy, and data management. This panel presentation is being given in response to the trend in academic … Continue reading →