The session consisted of brief presentations, with around 100 minutes of interactive work-along demo of data visualization with Jupyter Notebooks, and ended with Q&A. Participants learned to create data visualizations and can opt to either access Rutgers University’s high-performance computing (HPC) platform/cloud* or to run the code locally on their own computers.

This workshop instructed participants in how to get started with GitHub from scratch, including the basics of GitHub (account creation, organization use, permissions, and more); using GitHub to manage code and projects for academic research and teaching; best practices for data science workflows in GitHub; GitHub Actions for automated web scraping, data acquisition and dynamic data visualizations via RMarkdown; and publishing static websites and hosting them via GitHub pages.

In this virtual workshop, Dr. Jim Samuel, Executive Director of the Bloustein School’s Master of Public Informatics, provides an interactive introduction to textual analytics and natural language processing. The session includes a presentation and an approximate 30-minute interactive work-along demonstration for textual analytics using R-Studio. Participants will learn to generate insights from social media data related to current events or issues of public importance.