UC3

Notes on an Amazing Existing Excel Add-In

Last week I had an interesting conversation with Hazel Asuncion from University of Washington’s Bothell campus.  Along with an undergraduate computer science student, she’s  been working on the development of an add-in for Excel that helps track data provenance. “Hmm…”, you are thinking, “what is data provenance?”  (at least, that’s what I asked when I […]

DCXLblog Lite

Due to a number of upcoming activities associated with the DCXL project, both of this week’s posts are quite… light.  However there was a great webinar yesterday about DCXL-  Here’s the link.  It’s about 45 minutes of riveting discussion about DCXL, data management practices among scientists, and our future plans for the project. The DCXL […]

Your Turn!

For those of you that have been reading this blog, you know that I’ve devoted much of the content to results from scientist surveys.  How about you get involved?  If you or someone you know uses Excel in the course of Oceanography, Ecology, or Environmental or Earth Sciences research, please take 5 minutes to fill […]

Sharing Fish Data

Before last week, I had never attended an American Fisheries Society function.  I have known a few fisheries biologists in my academic and personal life, including one of my closest friends who works on migration patterns in coastal fishes.  I don’t recall having any preconceived notions about the differences between fisheries folks and ecologists (or […]

Excel Use Among Fisheries Folks

Last week I spent some time at the 2011 Fall Meeting for the American Fisheries Society.  The streets of Seattle were swamped with an estimated 4,000 AFS attendees… I wonder how many made it to Pike Place Market for a little on-the-ground research?  I was more interested in the tasty coffee choices that Seattle has […]

Potentially Problematic Excel Features

This post wraps up my report from the ESA conference, but I saved some of the best info for last.  I asked ecologists what features they used in Excel in the course of their research. There’s no question that this group of scientists is using Excel to its full potential.  However some of the features […]

Quantitative Results From the ESA Conference

For the last two posts, I have given a brief overview of the qualitative results from the ESA meeting.  For this post, I am reporting the nitty-gritty numbers. I formally surveyed 55 Ecologists while at the ESA meeting, and managed to get a fairly diverse pool. Here’s how their academic status fell out: Their areas […]

Ecology Spreadsheets 101

While at ESA, I wore two hats- one as the DCXL project manager, and one as a DataONE postdoc working on engaging the scientific community in data management, education, and archiving (see more about my work with DataONE here).  Part of my DataONE tasks at ESA involved participating in two workshops related to data management […]

ESA 2011 Meeting, Austin TX

Earlier this month, I attended the Ecological Society of America’s 2011 Meeting, held in Austin TX. I joined thousands of Ecologists in thinking, discussing, networking, and sweating in the 100+ temperatures.  Over the next couple of blog posts, I will share some of my insights based on my interactions at the meeting. The goal of […]

What Scientists Want: The Final Chapter

Here it is — the final installment of the requirements we are submitting for the DCXL add-in  “Requirements” are the capabilities we want the proposed add-in to have, based on discussions with scientists and other stakeholders.  For more information, read my three previous posts (here, here, and here) and check out the new Requirements page for more details […]