Advanced Research Computing: Research Data Management Community of Practice

Feb 27, 2025

11:00 am TO 12:00 pm

Join us February 27 at 11 AM for our next Community of Practice on RDM practices in Advanced Research Computing. Our SHARCNET colleague Dr. Sergey Mashchenko will be joining to talk about research data management for research computing! We'll talk about available computing resources and reproducibility when you're working with high volume and complexity data.  

In addition to being Senior Research Associate for SHARCNET, and a prolific educator in high-performance computing, Dr. Sergey Mashchenko is also computational astrophysicist with experience researching standard cosmology, the origin of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters, interstellar medium physics, and the dynamics of minor celestial bodies. 

Here is the meeting link. Learn more and join the RDM community!

Data Management Plan Bootcamp

May 13, 2025

1:00 pm TO 4:00 pm

Data Management Plans (DMPs) are both incredibly helpful research tools and increasingly required for grants but it can hard to know how to complete a Data Management Plan if it’s your first time. If you're in the process of creating a DMP, either for a grant application or for your own research, join RDM Services for this afternoon session. By the end of the session, you’ll understand what the major components of a DMP are and walk away with a potentially completed plan for your own research!

This session is especially relevant if you’re in the beginning stages of a research project or streamlining best practices for your research team. Come on your own, send your research staff, or bring your whole research group. This 3-hour session will briefly introduce the different sections of a DMP and all the important things to consider as you build it. The RDM services team will provide tailored guidance as you write your plan on site, and we'll have some light snacks and refreshments to keep you going. Come away with a clear path forward or even a finished DMP!

Let us know if you're solo or joining as a research team - we'll make sure you space to work together.

Learning Outcomes: Identify a strong data management plan compared to a weak response, section by section. Produce a solid outline of their own DMP.

Details: This workshop will not be recorded.

Facilitator Bio: 

Isaac Pratt (he/him) is a research scientist by training and has a PhD in Anatomy & Cell Biology. He leverages nearly a decade of interdisciplinary research experience to help support students, staff, and faculty. His expertise lies in questions surrounding data storage, security, planning, archival, and sharing. Isaac also provides support and curation services for McMaster Dataverse. His other interests include reproducible research methods, open science, and data science.

Danica Evering holds expansive experience with research support, education, project management, advocacy, and knowledge translation; with fluency in social practice art, healthcare, community research, data, and systems development. Danica supports students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with RDM through the data lifecycle—Data Management Plans, storage and backup, data security, data sharing. With an MA in Media Studies from Concordia, they are interested in fostering RDM within curious scholars and disciplines.

Certificate Eligibility: This workshop is eligible for the Sherman Centre's certificate program. For more information, visit scds.ca/certificate-program. It is also eligible for the Canadian Certificate for Digital Humanities. To learn more, visit ccdhhn.ca or contact scds@mcmaster.ca.

Data Deposit Bootcamp

May 20, 2025

1:00 pm TO 4:00 pm

Data deposit and data sharing are increasingly recognized as best practice to support open research, reproducibility, research integrity, collaboration, and more. Disciplines, funders, and journals are increasingly requiring researchers to share or deposit data. But how do you get your dataset ready for sharing? What's the best repository to share it in? If you have a dataset that's ready for deposit or that you'd like to get deposit ready, join RDM Services for this workshop.

By the end of this 3-hour session, you will be able to:

• Identify a target data repository

• Organize and create documentation for your dataset,

• Define your metadata, and

• (Potentially) begin the deposit process.

If you have a dataset ready to submit, bring it along! No dataset, no problems--we have a sample dataset you can use to go through the process and learn how to deposit data.

With light snacks and refreshments to sustain you and specialists on-hand to answer any questions, you'll end this session with ready-to-submit data...or submitted or even published data! Graduate Students who have finished their thesis work are encouraged to attend!

Learning Outcomes: Outline documentation and metadata best practices and identify the appropriate repository for their dataset. Develop a README file that thoroughly describes the dataset being deposited. Organize datasets in preperation for data deposit, including metadata entry.

Details: This workshop will not be recorded.

Facilitator Bio: 

Isaac Pratt (he/him) is a research scientist by training and has a PhD in Anatomy & Cell Biology. He leverages nearly a decade of interdisciplinary research experience to help support students, staff, and faculty. His expertise lies in questions surrounding data storage, security, planning, archival, and sharing. Isaac also provides support and curation services for McMaster Dataverse. His other interests include reproducible research methods, open science, and data science.

Danica Evering holds expansive experience with research support, education, project management, advocacy, and knowledge translation; with fluency in social practice art, healthcare, community research, data, and systems development. Danica supports students, postdocs, faculty, and staff with RDM through the data lifecycle—Data Management Plans, storage and backup, data security, data sharing. With an MA in Media Studies from Concordia, they are interested in fostering RDM within curious scholars and disciplines.

Certificate Eligibility: This workshop is eligible for the Sherman Centre's certificate program. For more information, visit scds.ca/certificate-program. It is also eligible for the Canadian Certificate for Digital Humanities. To learn more, visit ccdhhn.ca or contact scds@mcmaster.ca.