Research Data Services
Research Computing Services provides a range of data science, programming, and visualization services to help you work with research data more effectively and efficiently. We combine specialized technical skills with research experience to enable your innovative research.
- Get Help via a Consultation
- Join a Data Working Group
- Request Support for a Research Project
- Workshops and Training
Consultations
Consultants are available to help Northwestern researchers of all levels (undergraduate students, graduate students, postdocs, faculty, staff) from all schools and fields with a wide range of data challenges:
- Collecting data from the web, databases, APIs, and other sources
- Transforming, reformatting, and wrangling data files
- Extracting information from text data
- Troubleshooting R, Python, Stata, and other statistical and programming code
- Planning and setting up computing, storage, and data workflows for your projects
- Automating repetitive research tasks
- Writing scripts to manipulate, analyze, and visualize data
- Visualizing data for exploratory analysis, publication, or communication with the public
Consultations provide no-cost, short-term support to answer questions, help you get started, direct you to the right resources, or tackle small tasks. For larger projects, see Research Project Support services below.
Consultation Request Examples
Do you find yourself asking questions such as:
- How do I call an API?
- I'm doing the same thing over and over. Can this be automated?
- I have datasets in format X. Can you help me transform them to a CSV?
- Why isn't my code working?
- Can I collect data from Twitter? Facebook?
- How do I get word counts from these documents?
- The data I need is in tables in books. How do I scan these and extract the information?
- How do I make this plot better?
- What Python libraries should I use to extract the text from an online news article?
- My analysis takes hours to run on my laptop. What should I do?
- No one in my lab knows how to help me with X. Can you help?
- I need to learn X. Where should I start?
- My spreadsheet is so big my laptop won't open it. What do I do now?
- Do I need a database for this?
- I'm trying to do X. Where do I start?
We can help with these questions and more. Not sure what help you need? Does your need fall outside the topics listed above? We can help you define the problem and find the right resources.
Get help through a scheduled appointment/email or via our drop-in hours.
Data Drop-in Hours
Virtual drop-in hours are available Tuesday afternoons, 3-4pm, from October 6th through November 17th.
Drop in to talk to a data science consultant or GIS specialist. No need to request a consultation ahead of time. Just join our drop-in Zoom room (sign in to Zoom with your Northwestern account). We'll ask you to fill in our consult form and connect you with someone to answer your questions.
This service is provided in cooperation with Northwestern Libraries. Drop-in hours are not held during university breaks or exam weeks.
Schedule a Consultation
Consultation services are provided to students, postdocs, faculty, and staff to support research only. There is no cost for this service. Assistance with coursework or commercial endeavors is not available.
Ready to get started? After you tell us a little about what you need help with, we'll follow-up by email to get more details or schedule a video/phone call.
Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Working Groups
Do you have data waiting to be collected, cleaned, analyzed, or visualized? BYOD Working Groups provide structure, guidance, and accountability to help you make progress on data components of your research project over a two month period. Groups are formed quarterly.
The program includes:
- Help developing a project plan and timeline
- On-call assistance with your data and programming questions
- Assignment to a small group of researchers working on similar projects
- Weekly group check-ins to hold you accountable for meeting your deadlines
- A community of peers for talking through your ideas and celebrating your progress
- Access and referrals to learning resources to support your work
Sample projects could include text analysis, webscraping, data mining, data cleaning, machine learning, bioinformatics, constructing a computational pipeline, data visualization, database design, app design, and more. When selecting participants, we will give preference to projects that are well-defined and participants who either already have most of the skills needed to complete the project or who are motivated to learn and use new skills quickly.
For Fall 2020, all meetings will be held remotely. Preliminary meetings to review project plans with a group leader will begin in late September, with weekly group meetings in October and November. For Fall 2020, BYOD is open to all Northwestern graduate students, postdocs, staff, and faculty.To apply, complete this form. You will need to provide a summary of the data project you plan to work on during the summer. Deadline to apply for fall is Wednesday, September 16. Spots are limited, and we may not be able to accommodate everyone who is interested.
Research Project Support
Research Computing Services staff may also be available to support longer-term projects for faculty where specialized data analysis, visualization, or software development skills could enhance a project or are required for its success. Longer engagements often require funding to support, but there's never a cost for initial consultations and planning conversations. It helps us to hear about projects where such skills are required, even if funding is not available. We can support unfunded projects depending on our availability, and we can help you apply for funding to support your project. Learning more about your research allows us to plan future services that will best serve the needs of the research community.
Examples of Our Past Work
- Web application: Created a web-based tool that allowed research assistants to review a large collection of email documents and code information about the emails using a custom form. The tool increased research assistant accuracy and speed, allowed for easier monitoring and review of the work by the faculty member, and stored the work in a backed-up database.
- Data workflow redesign: Automated an hours-long, manual data workflow for a research lab that involved editing multiple spreadsheets in an error-prone process. The raw data files are instead uploaded to a cloud service, and lab staff can now run automated queries to extract the subset of data they need on demand in seconds.
- Data analysis support: Combined the results of a dozen online surveys, multiple participant activity logs from MOOC courses on multiple platforms, and several SQL database dumps to create datasets to analyze the impact of the MOOC courses. Analyzed and visualized the data for inclusion in study publication. Created code and data files to allow analysis to be shared and replicated.
- Research replicability: Reviewed and revised code and data files for a forthcoming journal article to ensure research results could be easily confirmed and built upon by other researchers. Created data dictionary, R Markdown document to produce paper's results, and a unified dataset.
- Data extraction: Extracted data on schools' performance from PDFs with varied formats. Exported data to a CSV file.
- Text processing: Developed dictionaries of key terms related to topic of interest, tracked prevalence of topic in a collection of documents overtime, and evaluated the accuracy and precision of the topical coding. Determined that machine learning methods would not produce the required level of accuracy for the research task given the amount and complexity of the data available.
- Data visualization: Created interactive visualization to allow users to explore relationships between variables in a dataset and produce plots of the data in their web browser.
Support is not limited to these examples. We are always excited to be challenged with new projects!
Learn More
Interested in talking about support for a longer project? Request a consultation and let us know you'd like to talk about support for a research project.
Workshops and Training
Helping you learn new skills is a big part of what we do! We offer workshops throughout the year, as well as online resources. We also partner with university organizations, groups, and departments to offer customized workshops or training for researchers. Looking to organize an event? Contact us to find out more.
Last Updated: 18 September 2020
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