Hands-on workshops that help you work with research data efficiently, reproducibly and openly.
If you work with data, a few programming basics will save you a lot of time and make your results reproducible. ZB MED has been offering workshops on these skills since 2018, explicitly designed for beginners with no prior IT experience.
Who are they for?
Medicine and health sciences: Our focus is on researchers, doctoral candidates and students in medicine, the health sciences and biomedical basic research, particularly at universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. We are actively expanding our offering for these groups. Medical students can register their interest in our planned workshops (form in German).
Libraries and infrastructure institutions: We also train staff in academic and public libraries as well as in research and infrastructure institutions.
Institutions can book workshops for their staff. Most workshops take place online, and in-person formats are available on request.
Most of our workshops are held in German. Library Carpentry and selected modules are also available in English.
Topics
Programming and automation
- Unix Shell and GNU/Linux: managing files and workflows from the command line
- Python: from the basics to data analysis with pandas and visualisation, with an advanced course and an introduction to machine learning
- Git, GitLab and Codeberg: tracking versions of your work and collaborating on projects
Research data
- Tidy Data and OpenRefine: structuring and cleaning spreadsheets
- SQL: querying data in relational databases
- Wikidata and Linked Open Data: capturing knowledge in a structured way and querying it with SPARQL
- FAIR Data & Software, Open Science and the research data lifecycle
New topics
- Working with local large language models (LLMs)
- Creating open educational resources (OER) with free and open-source software
Formats range from half-day modules to two-day workshops. Individual topics can also be combined into tailored formats.
Our approach: The Carpentries
Many of our workshops are based on the teaching materials and pedagogy of The Carpentries, an international non-profit community that develops openly licensed workshops on data and programming skills:
- Library Carpentry for libraries and information institutions
- Software Carpentry for programming in research
- Data Carpentry for analysing and visualising research data
A hallmark of the Carpentries approach is live coding: instructors write code step by step, and participants follow along on their own computers. Mistakes are part of the process and are solved together.
Several colleagues at ZB MED are certified Carpentries Instructors and Instructor Trainers and are active in the German-speaking Carpentries community. Our core offering is the two-day Library Carpentry workshop (Unix Shell, Python, Git), available in German or English. We also contribute to AI Carpentry, the Carpentries' new teaching materials on the reflective use of AI in research.
Request a workshop
Would you like to organise a workshop for your institution? Get in touch with us.
