The Digital Research Lunchtime seminar series provides an overview of the resources, services and tools available to researchers at the University of Edinburgh across the research lifecycle. Starting in 2020, just before the pandemic, the seminars turned into webinars for a couple of years and since 2022 have been delivered in hybrid mode. This year the seminars moved to the Bayes Centre, with in-person participants invited to join the networking lunch after the event.
The first session for 2024 took place on Monday, 22nd January, with contributions from the Edinburgh Research Office, Library Research Data Support, Digital Skills and Training, and the Facilitation team. The key takeaway from the seminar is to allow enough time to plan and design your project properly to ensure that you take advantage of all the available support and discover the resources you might need.
- Slides are available via our SharePoint
- Video recordings are available via our media hopper channel here
In a full seminar room at Bayes Centre, and with even more colleagues online via MS Teams, Emma Giles provided an overview of ERO, highlighting where you can find contact details for local research funding specialists and the funding opportunities and insights hub. Charis Wilson gave some tips and tricks, do’s and don’ts for preparing an application, gathered through ERO’s many years of experience. Useful resources are the dossier of successful applications and the recently developed course ‘Funded Research: Pathways to academic independence’ accessible through P&M. Notes from this presentation can be accessed here.
Simon Smith, from the Research Data Support team, started by defining research data as evidence underpinning your research questions, and research data management principles towards Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) data. Simon highlighted the importance of Data Management Planning and drew our attention to the get feedback functionality on DMPOnline, which enables research data experts to review DMPs developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh.
Tracy Steinberg, from Digital Skills and Training, presented the 6-month ‘Developing your Data Skills’ training programme, designed to fit around work or study. Depending on the level of study, the course might cover marketable data skills, including programming, statistics and analysis with Excel, R, Python, SQL, as well as data visualization.
Sarah Janac explained how Research Facilitators can help you in research planning, pointing out the Digital Research Services website, the single point of access to data and computational resources at the University of Edinburgh. Sarah mentioned the Resource Finder, to build your personalised toolkit, the schedule an online meeting functionality with a Research Facilitator to help you navigate the complex digital research services landscape at the University of Edinburgh, and the Research Computing Funding checklist to ensure that you budgeted your project properly.
Our next seminar is on 27th February 2024 and will focus on how to store and organise your data properly. Book your place (in-person) or online now!
Many of you might have noticed that the seminars are popular with long waiting lists. To avoid disappointment and secure your place, subscribe to our mailing list so you can find out first about upcoming events and digital research opportunities.