HPS Informatics Workshop
From digitalHPS
Contents |
Course Details
Summary
The HPS Informatics Workshop is intended to be a primer of informatics for interested members of the HPS community. Its model is the Medical Informatics course at the MBL and topics are based on Grant Yamashita's stint with the Science Informatics Group while on an NSF Professional Development Fellowship in spring 2010 [1]. The 2011 workshop will be held at the MBL from May 23-26.
This session grows out of the Digital HPS Collaborative that has developed under the initiative of the NSF-funded Embryo Project. This project is directed from Arizona State and developed in collaboration with the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.
Goals
The goal of the session is to introduce researchers in the HPS community to informatics skills and ideas, helping to forge a community of those with shared needs and interests. Participants this first year should have some working experience with digital resources (databases, websites, and search tools), though we expect each individual to come with different skill sets and different experiences, as well as to want different things from the workshop. We hope through this workshop to develop a better sense of the most effective approaches to use in future bootcamp sessions, so that we can make this short course a regular offering that is most effective for the community.
We each have diverse experiences in using multiple databases that are set up in different ways and the lack of infrastructural support for making these projects accessible and inter-operable presents a stumbling block to advancing both our projects and the field as a whole. As we seek to set up our own databases to achieve true broader impacts and to take our work to the larger publics, we have each encountered the challenges of doing it alone. In fact, many projects often work in isolation, and this means that there are many small historical projects inhabiting dark unexplored corners of the internet that are effectively lost to scholars. Or, they are found, but since they utilize proprietary data formats, do not have metadata, or run on outdated systems, they are not easily utilized by others. We want to lay out current best practices for such things as:
- Understanding how to use science and history databases effectively, including fine-tuning searches
- Understanding principles of database design
- Metadata, ontologies, and controlled terminologies
- Repository and web interface considerations
- Thinking about scalability/interoperability/sustainability/archiving
We will be led by library scientists and informaticians at the MBL and others from the HPS community. Mornings will build from lectures to introduce major themes, and afternoons will include individualized work session based on specific data of interest to the participants. Participants are encouraged to bring their own data from their respective digital projects.
References
1. Grant Yamashita; Holly Miller; Anthony Goddard; Cathy Norton. 2010. "A model for Bioinformatics training: the marine biological laboratory" Briefings in Bioinformatics doi: 10.1093/bib/bbq029
