News Blog | University Library

Making Maps in R

Making maps in R is something that I have been curious about for some time. If you ask a geographer, R probably isn’t at the top of their list for creating maps.

Register for Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Institute 2016

The Humanities Intensive Learning & Teaching Institute is delighted to announce that HILT2016 registration is now open. HILT will be held June 13-16, 2016 with special events on June 17th at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

Making Our Library Better through Metadata

As the head of Bibliographic and Metadata Services (BAMS), I coordinate the metadata creation for the vast array of digital collections produced by the IUPUI University Library Center

Want Readers? ResearchGate vs the Institutional Repository

Here’s a question I get at least a few times every month—I should really start keeping count … it goes something like this: “But I already have a ResearchGate profile, what’s the advantage of keeping other sites about my work up-to-date?” (Sometimes it’s “Academia.edu,” but less and less often on my campus.

Join us for Love Your Data week

Love Your Data week is almost here! LYD16 is a week devoted to helping students take better care of their research data, whether it takes the form of photos, numbers, text, videos, code, or social media interactions.

IUPUI Staff Council Adopts OA Statement of Support

At their November 18, 2015 meeting, IUPUI Staff Council, an elected campus entity that, “represents the staff in the communication processes and decision making of the university. . .and promotes staff development and recommends policies which aid in retaining highly qualified personnel. . .” among many other activities, adopted an Open Access...

IUPUI ScholarWorks: Chasing 30,000 Pageviews per Month

IUPUI ScholarWorks is an institutional repository. It's also a website ... which means that people come looking for our site with keyword searches, direct links, social media sharing and all the other awesome sauce that makes the Internet a busy place.

Open Access: A Win-Win Proposition

Open access benefits scholars everywhere by connecting them to research they may not otherwise be able to access, but I'd like to take a moment to look at open access in reverse. By making my research open access, I benefit myself as well as the community at large.

Visualizing Data with R and ggplot2

Lately, I have been spending more time playing around with R. As an R beginner and someone interested in data visualization, one of my favorite packages so far is ggplot2. This package vastly simplifies the process of plotting data and the results are rather aesthetically pleasing. One of the really powerful features of ggplot2 is the way in which it makes visually encoding multiple dimensions of a dataset much easier.In this brief tutorial, I will plot some data generated using Excel. The data (available here) represent 150 individuals and contains information on their gender, income, time spent commuting to work, student loans, and education level. I fabricated the data so that patterns will emerge in the resulting visualization that mimic what you might expect to see in the real world, but the data are totally fake.The following presupposes some basic familiarity with R. If you are brand new, you may want to start with a basic R tutorial – there are dozens freely available on the internet.

How Many Repositories Do We Need?

Last month Kathleen Fitzpatrick announced the launch of a new open access repository for the humanities, CORE. I love repositories and I love open access; so, I'm happy to see it. As a new repository, CORE has the advantage of an existing collection of users, members of MLA Commons--an academic social network that hopes to grow into a larger network for the humanities. MLA Commons/CORE is not the first academic social network to enter the repository space, but it's the right direction for repository development. Even so, it's a reactionary development and it's about a decade too late.