OSDC MiniSeries: Reproducible Research

All the goodness of our popular Carpentries workshops packed into shorter, bite-size portions!

These courses were created from curriculum originally developed by The Carpentries.

The aim of the OSDC MiniSeries workshops is to teach researchers basic concepts, skills, and tools for conducting research in a reproducible manner. Reproducible research is the idea that any result obtained by an experiment or observational study should be documented by making all data and code available in such a way that the computations can be executed again with identical results. Click here to learn more about research reproducibility at CMU.

Mini courses are designed to be completed within 2 to 4 hours. This abbreviated format is intended to complement the more intensive 2-3 day format of our Carpentries workshops and the 1-hour Library workshop series. Minis provide more modular presentations of the Carpentries curriculum and are therefore ideal for participants with more limited availability.

OSDC workshops are designed for participants with no programming experience.

Courses in this MiniSeries

Below is a list of the courses contained in this MiniSeries. Check out the CMU Libraries’ Events Calendar to learn about upcoming workshops and to access the registration page, or follow the links provided under each course description.


Cleaning Untidy Data with OpenRefine

OpenRefine is a free, open source tool to help you prepare your data for analysis. Quickly and easily transform data, split and merge columns, remove whitespace, and perform many more common data cleaning tasks.

Duration: 1.5 hours.

Check LibCal for the date of the next installment of this workshop.

View course curriculum.


Introduction to R

This 3-hour course was designed for those interested in working with data in R. It begins with basic information about R syntax and the RStudio interface, and moves through how to import CSV files, the structure of data frames, how to deal with factors, how to add/remove rows and columns, and how to calculate summary statistics from a data frame.

Duration: 3 hours.

Check LibCal for the date of the next presentation of this workshop.

View course curriculum.


Data Visualization with R

This 2-hour course teaches students to create customized data visualizations in R. Using the ggplot2 package, students will produce plots, histograms, density distribution, and other useful visualizations to bring their data to life.

Duration: 2 hours.

Check LibCal for the date of the next presentation of this workshop.

View course curriculum. Register here.


Learn foundational data science skills at your own pace with Minis2Go!

If you missed out on either of our recent Introduction to R or Data Visualization with R Mini Workshops, don’t despair! As of June 2021, we’ve made all of our curriculum available 24/7 and added a number of supplementary materials to let you learn at your own pace!

Click on the links below to access asynchronous versions of the workshops above. (New series will be added during the Fall 2021 semester.)

Complete this form to let us know how we can best support you in your learning journey and to join our mailing list, where you will receive personalized emails with suggested learning templates, helpful tips and tricks, and links to sign up for weekly office hours where you will have the chance to ask questions and connect with peers.