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Software & Data Carpentry

Students sit at round tables working on laptops in a workshop session while the instructor stands at a presentation desk at the center front of the room with her laptop on the desk. Large digital displays are on the walls around the room so students can follow what the instructor presents on her laptop to the class.

Service Overview

The Carpentries teaches foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide. Hands-on workshops cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, task automation, and fundamental data skills. Participants are encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems and workflows. Currently there are three curricula, Software Carpentry (SWC), Data Carpentry (DC), and Library Carpentry (LC). There are new communities such as High Performance Computing (HPC) that are working to join the other groups. 

Contact Us

What We Offer

Currently, three general beginner workshops are held during the fall and spring semesters. Locations of the workshops have been primarily held at the Bizzell Memorial Library in the HCLC Classroom LL123, and The Core and the Innovation Hub's active learning classroom, both located on OU's South Campus.

  • Beginner workshops
  • Workshops are held in fall and spring semesters 

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Who Can Use This Service

This service is open to all OU community members.

Current Sponsors

Workshop Topics

Software Carpentry

  • The Unix shell - automate repetitive tasks
  • Git and GitHub - version control to track and share work
  • Python or R - programming languages to build modular code

Data Carpentry

  • Spreadsheets - Best practices  
  • OpenRefine - Tidy Data, data cleaning
  • SQL - using databases to manage and interrogate data
  • Analytics and Visualization using R - Code provided for simple plots 

Workshop Schedule

Schedule and registration for Carpentries Workshops can be found on the OU Libraries Events page. You can receive notifications of when new workshop registrations open by subscribing to the email listserv mail group.

Brunette, female student is holding a book and smiling at the camera while standing in front of Bizzell Memorial Library on a sunny day with blue skies in the background.

Contact Information

Data Services
(405) 325-3341
dsds@ou.edu
Bizzell Memorial Library

FAQ

In the summer of 2013, the first Software Carpentry workshop was held on campus hosted the High Performance Computing group OSCER and the College of Atmospheric Sciences. Shortly afterwards, a second workshop was offered for the Biology Department and the Oklahoma Biological Survey. The workshops gained popularity and are now hosted and sponsored by OU Libraries to advance its mission to serve the research and academic units across the Norman campus.  

The University of Oklahoma joined the Software Carpentry Foundation (SCF) in October of 2015.  Members of the original consortium lead by OU Libraries included the College of Arts and Sciences, the Vice President for Research, the Oklahoma Biological Survey, and the South Central Climate Science Center. In January, 2018, Data and Software Carpentry merged to form a new organization called The Carpentries.