Funding, News and Announcements

ACENET has the following upcoming training available. All sessions are online and free of charge. 

Registration is available on the new training portal.

Static Websites in the Cloud
31 October, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic / 1330-1630hrs NL

A common use case for cloud computing is web hosting. We will discuss differences between static and dynamic websites, with a focus on the security and maintenance benefits of static websites. We will make use of pre-created virtual machines to create a website using the Jekyll static website generator, and along the way cover markdown a human readable syntax for formatting text.

Desktops in the Cloud
5 November, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic / 1330-1630hrs NL

The Cloud provides access to hardware resources beyond those available on your laptop or desktop, though you may still want to interact with that hardware as if it were your laptop using a graphical user interface (GUI) desktop. In this workshop we will install a GUI desktop on a remote virtual machine and connect to it from our laptop, allowing us to use this remote desktop almost as if it were our local machine.

Introduction to Python & Coding for HSS - Parts I and II in the HSS Python Series
6, 13 November, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic | 1330-1630hrs NL (online)

This is a beginner-level 4-part series for humanities and social sciences researchers (HSS) and librarians. Introduction to Python and Coding for HSS - Parts I and II focus on introducing participants to basic coding concepts and fundamentals to help them confidently participate in high-level conceptual discussions with computer programmers or technical team members. We will use Python due to its vast popularity, easy syntax, and powerful extensions while working in the user-friendly and convenient JupyterLab environment. These general concepts will be reinforced and illustrated with the hands-on development of simple programs that can help with text-based research and analysis immediately. 

Command the Cloud
7 November, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic / 1330-1630hrs NL

In ‘Introduction to Cloud’, we used the OpenStack web interface to create our first virtual machine. With this web interface many common tasks can be performed, however, some important tasks cannot be completed using only the web interface; instead a command line interface (CLI) is needed. The CLI also allows access to some additional and very useful tasks, such as downloading virtual machine images, and provides access to information not shown in the web interface. In this workshop, we will show how to setup and use the OpenStack CLI and perform some common tasks when managing virtual machines.

Using Git Tools Part I: Version Control
19 November, 1300-1630hrs Atlantic / 1330-1700hrs NL

Version control is the practice of managing and sharing changes to documents, programming code, websites or any other files to keep track of what’s been changed, by whom, when and why. All previous versions of files are saved and you can even revert to a previous version. Git is a version control software. Git-portal sites, like GitHub or GitLab, offer many useful features to facilitate collaborative development. This is the first workshop of a two-part series. The first session focuses on version control. The second explores using Git for collaborative development. This beginner level session will introduce you to Git. We will show you how to create a repository, record changes to files, explore and restore from the recorded history and how to resolve conflicts (when one member overwrites another’s changes).

Introduction to API Querying for HSS -- Part III in the HSS Python Series
20 November, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic / 1330-1630hrs NL

This is a beginner-level 4-part series for humanities and social sciences (HSS) researchers (HSS) and librarians. API Querying and Textual Analysis - Parts III and IV focus on allowing participants to apply basic coding concepts to API querying and text-based analysis. API stands for application programming interface. It acts as a communication interface so different computers/systems can talk to the application hosting the API. Querying APIs in HSS research is useful because data changes rapidly and it is a way to capture a small piece of a much larger set of data.

Using Git Tools Part II: Collaboration Platforms
26 November, 1300-1630hrs Atlantic / 1330-1700hrs NL

Version control is the practice of managing and sharing changes to documents, programming code, websites or any other files to keep track of what’s been changed, by whom, when and why. All previous versions of files are saved and you can even revert to a previous version. Git is a version control software. Git-portal sites, like GitHub or GitLab, offer many useful features to facilitate collaborative development. This is the second workshop of a two-part series. The first session focuses on version control. This session will focus on collaborative development workflows using Git-collaboration sites like GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. It will demonstrate how to work with branches, issue tracking, contribute to projects using pull-/merge-requests, code-review, how to run CI/CD-pipelines, and how to use other common features of these platforms.

Textual Analysis using Python for HSS - Part IV in the HSS Python Series
27 November, 1300-1600hrs Atlantic / 1330-1630hrs NL

This is a beginner-level 4-part series for humanities and social sciences (HSS) researchers (HSS) and librarians. API Querying and Textual Analysis - Parts III and IV focus on allowing participants to apply basic coding concepts to API querying and text-based analysis. We will use a Python library to analyze textual data and learn about common natural language processing (NLP) tasks such as part-of-speech tagging, noun phrase extraction, sentiment analysis, classification, and more to explore meaningful trends in language patterns.

Visualization with R
27 November, 1300-1500hrs Atlantic / 1330-1530hrs NL

While working with large sets of numbers, it is often quite useful to display the information graphically. Often, we use basic graph types such as histograms, scatter plots, bar charts, boxplots etc. In this session, we will use the programming language R to create visualizations of large datasets. Basic knowledge of R is recommended, although not mandatory. By the end of this session, participants will be able to: create simple scatterplots, histograms, and box plots; compare the plotting features of base R and ggplot2 package; plot with ggplot2; plot time series data; and, arrange and export plots.