The University of Edinburgh provides a wide range of resources for staff and students interested in using data-led and digital research methods.
Research During the Pandemic: resources complied specifically for those conducting remote and online research during the global Covid-19 pandemic.
uCreate Studio is the University of Edinburgh’s digitally focussed community makerspace. Providing free access to a range of new and transformative technologies along with user support, training, specialist advice and guidance on their use. Supported activities include Computer Aided Design and Manufacture; Electronics and Programming; 3D Digitisation and Virtual and Augmented Reality. The uCreate Studio service is available for use by anyone within the University of Edinburgh community during staffed hours (10am – 8pm, Monday to Friday) following induction.
uCreate also provides printing and specialist multimedia software and hardware, including Adobe Creative Suite and large format colour and 3D printers. Off-air recording and broadcast media archive service (Box of Broadcasts) are also available, which allows staff and students to record and catch-up on missed programmes on and off-campus, schedule recordings in advance, edit programmes into clips, create playlists, embed clips into VLEs, share what they are watching with others and search a growing archive of material.
The Digital Innovation Team is a group of digital developers, designers, copywriters and multimedia specialists who provide a digital development service to the staff and students in the schools within the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. As well as designing and building research project websites and applications using popular platforms such as Drupal and Wordpress, they also provide advice and guidance on digital design and development and the use of technology for research purposes.
The University of Edinburgh's Research Data Service provides a suite of services and tools, delivered by experts, with the aim of providing the tailored support researchers need throughout the research lifecycle. Whether researchers are creating new datasets or reusing existing data, the team can advise on how best to manage, store and share data.
Digital Research Services provides a single point of access to all of the data and computing services available to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. A team of research facilitators can help researchers to identify the services that meet their needs, develop their digital research skills, scale up projects, clarify data and computing requirements, improve data management plans, and meet funder requirements.
ProQuest TDM Studio is a web-based platform that allows researchers to access and analyze large-scale textual data from Proquest's collections. Researchers can work together in a coding workbench in a Jupyter Notebook environment, building a project corpus and conducting data analysis, text mining, and visualization.
CDCS manages the University of Edinburgh's Proquest Workbench: please get in touch with us via email to discuss access.
Gale Digital Scholar Lab is an online tool for collecting data sets comprised of content from the University of Edinburgh's Gale Primary Sources purchases. These data sets can be analysed using open-source text analysis and visualization tools built into the Digital Scholar Lab. Tools included are Ngram, Topic Modelling (Mallet), Named Entity Recognition, Parts of Speech (SpaCy), Sentiment Analysis (OpenNLP), Clustering (SciKit) and Term Frequencies (Lucene).
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is an internationally-recognised centre of expertise in digital curation with a focus on building capability and skills for research data management. The DCC provides expert advice and practical help to research organisations wanting to store, manage, protect and share digital research data. Many research teams are aware of data curation and its numerous benefits, but few have so far managed to address the issues practically and effectively in a working environment. The DCC is committed to bridging this gap by sharing knowledge and experience with research organisations internationally.
The Data Lab is Scotland’s innovation centre for data and AI, helping Scotland to maximise value from data and lead the world to a data-powered future. Through hubs in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, The Data Lab fosters innovation through collaboration, builds skills and grows talent, and champions Scotland’s data science community. They act as a catalyst, using their expertise, network, funding and platform to change how Scotland (and the world) innovates with data.