10 Association of Research Libraries Research Library Issues 298 2019 and her graduate student assistants present interesting features of a data set, the right data format for a visualization design, and the right tool to format data. When moving into the visualization phase, Ximin emphasizes the logic behind the tool’s functionality. Through design thinking and hands-on exercises, Ximin’s expectation is that students will grow to understand effective design appropriate to the audience’s social and cultural background. Data viz-embedded classes are offered in several academic programs at Georgia Tech, including business, industrial and systems engineering, public policy, and computational media. Ximin points out that in embedded classes, instruction also features hands-on exercises to familiarize students with the tools. In these classes, the demonstration projects are designed with data the class instructor provides, or data about the topics of the class projects. Ximin and her team also offer lab hours and flexible follow-up consultation hours to review students’ project designs and implementation. After three semesters of instruction, the libraries’ data viz program taught more than 1,500 learners, including students, faculty, and staff. Students are utilizing the tools they learned to create scholarship in innovative ways. In the spring 2019 semester, 30 students changed their class projects from print to digital. Not only did they save the cost of printing, but also their work is easily saved online for further study, sharing, or publishing in future. Ximin and her group keep detailed assessment of the effectiveness of their teaching so they continue to improve. Ameet Doshi and Jay Forrest teach a popular coding workshop series on R and R Studio. R is an open source statistical software package commonly used for data analysis, visualization, and an increasing array of related scientific purposes. R Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE), which helps R be more user-friendly and expand its capacity. Because R is a popular open source tool, the breadth of R “packages,” or niche system capabilities, as well as community support, continues to expand. These workshops have been well received by the
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