From the category archives:

Database Management

User Experience Design

5 May 2011
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Have you ever visited a web site and wondered who created such a great experience? Have you ever wondered who makes the invisible visible?
No? Why do you think that is? If it works well, you don’t notice it, and if the site is a mess, it is all you do notice.
Therefore, what element can help [...]

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The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database

10 January 2011
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How would you organize, store, and disseminate data on 35,000 trans-Atlantic ship crossings that carried over 10 million Africans into slavery between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries?
The project team of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database has done just that. Data has been contributed by a few dozen people, and the project team consists of two [...]

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Beyond C.S.I.: The Rise of Computational Forensics

6 January 2011
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How can you determine if two fingerprints are merely similar or are an exact match? Is forensics as practiced currently, skill and art — or science?
I was surprised to learn from Sargur Srihari that forensics is not as scientific in its methods as one might think from watching the various TV shows. Neither are the [...]

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Digital Preservation Education for NC State Government Employees

19 November 2010
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This past week, the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources released guidelines for state employees responsible for preservation of the state’s public record. I have included the press release below. Whether or not you are an employee of the State of North Carolina, if you are interested in learning about digital preservation, I encourage you [...]

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Oxford Launches Research Data Management Website

16 November 2010
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The following announcement was posted to the Research Data Management listserv on 14 November 2010 via S. Hodson. I thought it might be on interest to some of you.

The University of Oxford has recently launched a new Research Data Management Website: www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm
The development of this resource was ‘a close collaboration between Research Services, Computing [...]

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Preservation Policies, Forbes, and an Email Time Capsule

12 November 2010
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I’m often asked why the preservation of digital materials is so complicated. After all, isn’t it simply about the storage and migration, or emulation, of digital objects and metadata? Why do you need all of these policies and procedures around a data or digital archive? Why can’t you just store the digital files and leave [...]

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Is “Information Management” Hype?

29 January 2010
Is Information Management Hype?

I enjoyed watching this video from 2008. It begins with a variety of quotes and mis-quotes by technology experts beginning in 1899, using an early 1900s moving pictures style of graphics. The author then uses images of streams of data and a catchy Elvis song to throw (unsourced) facts and figures out about data use, [...]

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An Information Management Fairy Tale

23 January 2010
An Information Management Fairy Tale

This is a story about a young dragon, Data Quality, who settles in a shire, far, far away. He seemed harmless at first, so he was ignored. Then he grew into a menace, and the villagers hired a knight to fight the dragon and found the fountain of knowledge.

And they all lived happily ever after.
[Thanks, [...]

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The Fourth Paradigm Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

16 December 2009
The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery

John Markoff, the author of a New York Times article called, “A Deluge of Data Shapes a New Era in Computing“, writes that Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley and Kristin Tolle have edited a book that discusses the “Fourth Paradigm”. The book, The Fourth Paradigm Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery, is in honor of Jim Gray, who argued [...]

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Data Scientist vs. Data Manager

5 December 2009
intersection of science and technology

So, what exactly is a data scientist? How does this role compare to a data manager?
The authors of a 2005 National Science Foundation (NSF) report defined five actors in data management: data users, authors, managers, scientists and funding agencies. Today, I will examine the data scientist vs. the data manager.
First, what are the shared goals [...]

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