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Agenda

  • Reflections about the first round of the peer-observation program
  • Roundtable discussion on tools you’ve found useful in your research or academic work
  • Thank yous and farewells

Peer-observation program: reflections

Reza: It was good to have feedback from someone using a Mac, as the icons are different from a PC

Amir: Appreciate Reza’s good feedback

  • Even for those aspects that don’t need to change, it’s nice to have confirmation they’re working well

Albina: Interesting to watch how Elham used questions to build-in interactivity

Maria: Observed Reza

  • Was very helpful and interesting to see how other teams conduct workshops
  • Great experience and enjoyable

June and Maya have co-hosted workshops previously and have sat in on each other’s workshops

Jeremy: Thank you to all involved

  • We have learned things along the way to do differently next time (i.e., the ease/difficulty of observing others’ workshops, based on whether they’re in-person vs. online)
  • Team Leads can plan early enough in the term so GAAs can be paired with one another
  • Recordings could be a way to help with scheduling and other conflicts. In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of recordings?

Albina: Having access to a recording is nice because it allows you to pause, go back, and replay

  • This is especially important when you’re not familiar with a platform, as is Albina’s case with Zotero

June: Has had many people request recording

  • Agrees that recordings could be very helpful

Billie: The GitHub page is available for people to refer to

  • Incorporates that into workshops
  • A big part of workshops is about practice and addressing exceptions

Academic/research tools

In preparation for this meeting, participants were asked to think about 1 or 2 tools they’ve found useful for their research or academic work. Tools can be from a wide range of categories–software, browser plugins, websites, frameworks, workshops, etc.

  • Grammarly plugin (Albina):
    • Proofreads documents right in your browser
  • Wave web-accessibility evaluation tool (Joe):
    • Based on W3C guidelines
  • Quillbot paraphrasing software (Reza):
    • Works in either a browser or a word processer
    • Provides great suggestions, particularly if English is not your first language
    • AI-based
    • Use an iterative process: receive feedback, edit, then run it again
  • Atlas TI (Amir):
    • Alternative qualitative-data-analysis software package to NVivo
  • Diigo (Amir):
    • Allows you to take snapshots of texts and images on webpages
    • You can highlight and add comments
    • See also https://www.scrintal.com/
  • Megasync (Maya):
    • Recently switched from Mendeley to Zotero
    • Megasync allows you to store PDFs in the cloud
    • Great way to save space on your computer
    • Desktop app: https://mega.io/desktop
    • Reza: You can save documents in the cloud and link them to Zotero
      • This is a great idea for me to include in my next workshop
  • Google Earth Engine (June):
    • A vast database of publicy-accessible planetary-scale imagery
    • Great for weather and climate data
    • Includes a GUI and JavaScript and Python APIs
    • Used it extensively in my research
    • Maya: I second June’s recommendation
      • Great for change-over-time analysis, too
  • XMind (Billie):
    • Useful for organizing timelines
    • Very flexible platform
  • Notion (Maria):
    • Great for collaborative work (up to 10 people)
    • Can create small databases
    • Very useful for storing a lot of different types of information together (I use it to organize everything)
    • Takes a bit of time to learn, but worth it
    • Billie: I second that
      • Lots of different templates
      • There is a limit for number of images and collaborators
  • Portable Apps (Jeremy):
    • Repackages open-source apps to work on Windows
      • E.g., slicing and stitching together PDFs, setting up a web server
    • Workaround for workstations where you might not have admin privileges
  • Research Rabbit (Angela):
    • Great for literature reviews (the “Spotify of literature reviews”)
    • Free and open source
    • Integrating Zotero soon
    • Very intuitive for finding articles
    • Can set up alerts for recent publications
    • Pulls from many journals
  • Yale Mesh analyzer (Prubjot):
    • Excellent tool for my work in Health Sciences reviews
    • Can produce an Excel spreadsheet of subject headings for articles side by side
  • Stack Overflow (June):
    • Excellent resource for finding help with coding issues, but also acts as a parent site to many others
      • E.g., ‘Stack Overflow Gardening’, procedures for applying for jobs, ‘Cross-validated’ for statistics
  • Radio Garden (Evan):
    • Way to explore local music on a global scale using a map interface
  • Tropy (Jess):
    • Organizes research photos (‘Zotero, but for images’)
    • Room for metadata
  • Wombo (Albina):
    • Uses AI to generate images based on text
    • Possible use case: Generating image for dissertation cover based on title

Thank yous and farewells

Evan: The last part of our meeting is dedicated to thanking you all for another successful term of Research Common’s workshops, consultations, project work, and other areas where you contribute to our services and support. I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to starting a new term in the summer with our GAAs who plan to continue on with the Research Commons: Bille, Jerin, Reza, Amir, Elham, and our new GIS GAA Lily, who will start in May. Sadly, this is also the part of the meeting where some of us will have to say our goodbyes. After this term, we are seeing four of our GAAs–Maya, June, Maria, and Albina–move on from their time at the RC and into new phases of their academic or professional careers.

As their Team Lead, I wanted to give special thanks to June Skeeter and Maya Daurio, who have been my only GIS GAAs. They’ve gone above and beyond as teammates. Both were also GTAs for our first TLEF grant developing reusable technology workshops to enhance digital literacy. I can’t express how much I’ve enjoyed working with both of them over the last couple of years and how much I believe they’ve contributed to the RC’s services around geospatial information and technology.

Jeremy: It has been a pleasure to work with Albina and Maria. It is clear from feedback that your contributions have benefited us greatly. I wish you well with whatever comes next.

June: I thoroughly enjoyed this position. I learned a lot along the way (e.g., GitHub workflows and GitHub Pages). I am thankful for being involved in a variety of different projects and activities.

Maya: I feel similarly. I love the services the RC offers. I am pleased to be part of this team. It was great to be able to continue to dabble in GIS, which is not my main research focus.

Albina: This has been a fantastic learning opportunity. I agree with June regarding the opportunity to be involved in a variety of learning projects.

Maria: This has been a great opportunity to meet other GAAs and to collaborate.

Maya: Thank you, Brett, for inputting our time.

Angela: We’re very thankful for your help. You’re the backbone of our operations with students. In recognition of this, we have a ‘thank you’ card for each of you.

ACTION: If you’re on campus, please stop by Angela and Brett’s office (Room 455) to pick up your ‘thank you’ card. If you can’t pick it up in person, please email Angela (angela.liu@ubc.ca) your mailing address.