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In part 1 of “140 Characters is the New Black”, I briefly outlined why academics have largely been resistant to giving social media the +1 it so rightly deserves, citing both Nicholas Kristof’s article and some of my own (non-empirically tested) hypotheses. In part 2, I offered a quick glimpse into three channels (Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube) and how to get a decent handle on them.
Now I’ll offer my version of the road ahead: how do we incentivise academics and researchers to engage in social media, how do we help them help themselves, and what are the overall net benefits?
My Utopia
Entering the academic world you are guaranteed three things:
1. You will teach
2. You will research
3. You will attend conferences
And what do you know? Social media fits like a Chi-Square (as in, fits good).
1. You will teach:
Twitter has you covered! Here you can even read about 50 different ways of using Twitter in the classroom. (Read this one for a laugh). In 2009, Dr. Rank (professor of History at UT Dallas) tried a class Twitter experiment, allowing students to contribute to discussion through tweeting questions and comments - prompting more than just the regulars to engage with the subject material.
Right here at the University of Melbourne, Dr. Mike Pottenger (Statistics & Political Economy lecturer) has utilised Twitter’s capabilities by allowing students to tweet questions through a subject-specific #hashtag.
If that’s not incentive enough, here’s the P-bomb: Promotion. As a staff member there are four areas for promotion, two of which are ‘Contribution to teaching & learning’ and ‘Engagement’. As mentioned by Professor Sophie Arkoudis at the Academic Staff Orientation, students enjoy “being taught by people who have attempted to be at the cutting edge in their fields”. Social media can be that cutting edge – that innovation. And sure, by definition, innovation is risky - but it may pay off. Teaching is probably the most difficult area of promotion to prove, so why not use social media as a quantifiable tool to highlight your students’ active engagement? (an example: number of twitter questions asked and engaged with). Go on, throw it a like.
2. You will research:
Have an idea? Why not blog it? Emerging research has found that longer, well-crafted blog-posts are getting mass attention! Developing an idea through blogging can not only increase your world-wide reputation, it may open up the floodgates to a brand new audience willing to actively engage with your material. Social media knows no geographical bounds!
How do you get the word out? Why not tweet it? Twitter will allow you to share your ideas, questions and blog-posts, and collaborate with like-minded academics. While LSE has some good tips, I think it’s invaluable to hear it right out of the Twitter-birds’ mouth: Researcher, Deborah Lupton summarises her experiences “Social media for academia: some things I have learnt”.
And once again, the third area of promotion is “Research”. If social media can help you research better, faster and more efficiently, why not hand it a favourite?
Blogging, answering those tough philosophical questions of our time.
3. You will attend conferences:
Conferences aren’t just about catering. They are a battle of ideas. An opportunity to meet, collaborate, argue, explore and learn. And guess what, most of them are Twitter-friendly. I can almost guarantee that your next conference will have its own #hashtag - make sure you tweet along!
Twitter can be your common ground; an opportunity to see who else is connected. Your favourite academic? Great! Throw them a follow, flick them a tweet and build your relationship. Chances are they’re Twitter-enthusiasts, so get into the Twitter-space early!
Academic conference live-tweeting is most definitely a thing. Here are some tips. Replace your notepad with your Twitter dashboard and kill a few Twitter-Birds with one stone: actively engage with conference material, meet new faces (take it to the face-to-face level!), and build an archive to re-visit later. Say #yes at your next conference.
Everyone’s doing it #tweeptweep Even Glyn!
So what can #ResBaz do to help engage academics in social media? Well, a number of things:
Keep writing blog-posts: practice what you preach and make a splash!
Produce some sort of guide/document: helps to legitimise the University’s enthusiasm about social media with academia.
Find collaborations: central University of Melbourne Social Media is definitely a great start! (Interested in helping? Shoot me a tweet!)
Find the champions: those academics who have already embraced the wonders of social media. (Again, please do tweet me)
Run a workshop! Show them how it’s done with some active participation. But make sure to invite some champions. As Nicholas Kristof argues, academics are trained to strictly communicate with one another and their superiors. So surely they’ll listen to each other too!?
Build a community: encourage & empower your social media literate academics to share the enthusiasm by tweeting, blogging, and vlogging. This will hopefully create a ripple effect and get more academics on board.
Never forget: social media should only be used as a tool, not a proxy, for real life interaction.
The final question: Who benefits? Apart from the academics? We all do.
Getting academics on board will help legitimise social media as a professional tool with the potential of producing world-class, life-changing, revolutionary research. The possibilities, the collaborations, the ideas are endless.
Nicholas Kristof made a very important, and quite daunting, comment: Academics are reproducing a culture of exclusivity through continually writing and publishing for each other and their superiors, rather than the public. Perhaps social media can change that. Through entertaining ideas in the open, being restricted to 140 characters, actively engaging with communities and individuals previously unreachable, finding new collaborations and traces of understanding, perhaps we begin to step a little closer to a more common intellectual good. A place of open knowledge. Research by the people, for the people.
That’s what I call revolutionary.
Interested in potentially collaborating, being a champion or attending the workshop? Please fill this out! Would love to hear from you.
By Katie Ewing
Research can be ‘bazaar’… but it doesn’t have to be.
We’re pleased to announce The Research Bazaar Conference (#ResBaz), the first of its kind in Australia. This event aims to kick-start a training programme assuring the next generation of researchers are equipped with skills and tools to make their research better.
Just picture a bazaar of research apps! (Image courtesy of The Power Plant Mall)
#ResBaz will be held in February 2015 at the University of Melbourne. Check back here to see updates as we plan this unique event!
By Damien Irving.
I recently posted about the different types of requests we get for Software Carpentry bootcamps. Some are from students who have recognised that their colleages could use some assistance writing code, some are from lecturers who’d like to improve the computational literacy of their students, and others are from postgraduate student groups who’d like to provide a professional development opportunity for their members.
In planning a bootcamp for an interested student, lecturer, or postgraduate group, these are the questions we typically get asked:
1. What gets taught at a bootcamp?
What do we usually teach at a @swcarpentry bootcamp? This screenshot pretty much sums it up… #ResBaz #HackerWin pic.twitter.com/rVAf4WOugU
— ITS Research (@ITS_Res)
April 18, 2014
(Note that Python is the programming language we use most frequently at bootcamps, however we are able to use R or Matlab instead depending on the audience.)
2. Who usually attends?
The participants are typically postgraduate students, post-docs and other researchers around Melbourne (i.e. we don’t restrict to just UniMelb people) who have a very basic familiarity with programming concepts like loops, conditionals, and arrays, but need help to translate this knowledge into practical tools to help them work more productively.
3. How long does it go for?
There’s two-days worth of material in a typical bootcamp, which we like to spread across four morning or afternoon sessions (e.g. Mon & Wed one week then Mon & Wed the next).
4. What’s the teaching format?
Participants bring their own laptops with the required software installed. The syllabus is then delivered via a series of short 10-15 minute demonstrations (i.e. live coding) interspersed with regular challenges that are worked on in pairs. During the challenges tutors circulate the room answering questions (at a ratio of about 1 helper for every 6 students).
.@russellsim & @Manetheran helping researchers at the @combine_au @swcarpentry bootcamp. Thanks helpers! @ITS_Res pic.twitter.com/D5qNRvxCz5
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
March 26, 2014
5. What does the interested student/lecturer/group need to do?
In a nutshell, we provide the teaching (i.e. a lead instructor, team of tutors and all necessary equipment) and you provide the participants (i.e. advertise to your networks). We’re also happy to handle registrations.
6. How much does it cost?
It’s free!
7. When should the bootcamp be?
Anytime that suits you.
8. Where should be bootcamp be?
If you have access to a sufficiently large and laptop friendly teaching space that’s great, otherwise we typically deliver the bootcamps in one of the lecture theatres in the Alan Gilbert Building or a Collaborative Learning Space in Old Arts at UniMelb. In those venues we can accommodate up to about 45 participants.
If you’d like to know more, please get in touch either via email (research.bazaar@gmail.com) or by coming along to Hacky Hour to have a chat!
By Paul Mignone
Yesterday saw a fantastic initiative held at the University of Melbourne. House of Cards, a socially responsible cafe promoting community well being, teamed up with MAP applicants Katie Ewing and Jin P'ng in hosting a 3D printer on site.
Jin and Katie getting ready for the peak hour coffee rush!
They’re keeping their cards ‘close to the chest’ (pardon the pun), but Katie and Jin certainly have big plans for 3D printing in the hospitality industry. For three hours they spent educating bystanders on the benefits of the technology, as well as conducting surveys and offering prizes.
These two never miss a beat!
The initiative was certainly a win/win, as it attracted both a lot of interest for their project and increased foot traffic for the cafe. We at ResBaz are certainly looking forward to their MAP presentation in a couple of weeks time, and many more attendees at the next drop-in session!
Stay tuned…
If you’re local, feel free to drop by! #3dprinting #digismith pic.twitter.com/hI0uc2oaRB
— Paul Mignone (@paulmignone)
April 15, 2014
By Fiona Tweedie
In case you thought it was all about the scientists over at the Research Bazaar, we’d like to reassure you that we’re thinking about the arts and social sciences as well.
Whether they’re tracking endangered languages, reconstructing trade routes or diving deep into a literary mystery, humanities researchers often need to customise maps to present the research findings. We’re offering two tools to researchers to help them with this challenge. The first, CartoDB, is an easy way of getting geocoded data onto a map. Once the basic data is loaded, CartoDB makes it simple to use size and colour to add nuance.
Archaeologists Emily Poelina-Hunter and Jarrad Paul learning CSS
Our first Carto DB workshop of 2014 was attended by postgraduate students from history, archaeology and linguistics. Archaeologist Josephine Verduci is in the final stages of her PhD thesis looking at cultural interaction in the eastern Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age. She has examined over 2,500 items of metal jewellery from 28 sites from around the Aegean, Cyprus, Israel and Jordan, looking for culturally specific motifs within ancient Philistia. Presenting her data visually on a series of customised maps makes it easier to see the patterns in her dataset.
Josephine and Steve at work on her map at the follow-up session
And if you need more control over your base map, we’ll be offering classes in TileMill as well. TileMill lets you decide what your underlying map should look like and add features such as roads and terrain. This can be important as many of the base maps offered by CartoDB include modern features that don’t belong on historical maps. Once you’ve perfected your base map, it’s straightforward to use CartoDB to overlay your data.
By Paul Mignone
Today I had the fantastic opportunity of attending the opening of the DreamWorks Animation Exhibition being held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). The opening was held at the Sofitel on Collins Street, where I and Bernard joined media, artists, computer vendors and even government officials at the event. Given the formal nature of the event, I should have dressed better for it in hindsight! Saying “I’m a uni student” is an excuse that can only be stretched so far!
Paul and Po: Peas in a Pod!
The highlight of this event (besides the fantastic lunch), was the interview between ABC’s Virginia Trioli and DreamWorks Animation CEO and founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg. I must admit that I didn’t know much about Katzenberg before this event other than he was the CEO of DreamWorks. Therefore I never realised the amazing career story behind the man. However in the sixty minute interview, he spoke about his early career spanning from politics, Paramount Pictures and the Walt Disney Company. He also touched on the topics of his falling out with Michael Eisner, leaving Disney, and the creation of DreamWorks SKG and DreamWorks Animation.
Virginia and Jeffery: From the nosebleed section!
In his interview, Jeffery made two points which struck a chord with me both personally and professionally. These points are what I believe makes the ResBaz initiative so important.
1) The need to create companies that are both financially viable, and that foster innovation and risk. We’ve heard this line from a million business professionals before, but I was surprised to hear Katzenberg mention that the first Shrek movie was a ten year, high risk project. While it was a huge box office success, it was also considered risky for an animated film, as it told the story in a way that appealed to both adults and children. This was something that hadn’t been done before.
A hypothesis or an idea, which is high risk, will take years to develop, and may not work in the end. For PhD students and researchers, this story sounds very familiar, and it was refreshing to see that research and film production are not as far apart was we first think. This is why I believe ResBaz is important, as it is giving students opportunities to develop an idea or project, and seeing where it takes them.
2) Katzenberg also gave a fantastic piece of career/life advice at the end of the interview. No matter you do, always try to deliver above expectation. It doesn’t matter if its friends, family or work, consistently delivering above the expectations of others will consistently bring you rewards in the long run. With ResBaz giving students the skills (e.g. software carpentry), resources (e.g. 3D printing) and opportunities to exceed their own expectations, we hope it will help to create better researchers, and hopefully more inspirational individuals like Jeffery in the future.
by Andy Tseng
Written in PHP and deployed with a MySQL as the backend database, LimeSurvey is an open-source, user-friendly, feature-rich web application that enables users to develop and publish surveys and gather responses without any programming knowledge.
As you can imagine Researchers, especially those in social sciences, do a lot of surveying, and there are many online survey tools made available. Here @ITS_Res we are recommending a tool named LimeSurvey because of these three points:
- it’s a mature open source project and thus no licensing fees
- has a large user community for support
- self-managed user account
- you can generate & run multiple surveys within one user account
- the survey templates & questions are reusable
- it supports complex conditions between questions
As per the third point we already have some amazing researchers working with the tool:
Satu Alakangas (Liaison Librarian from FBE) is helping build up the community and (most importantly) methodologies for doing qualitative and quantitative surveys using LimeSurvey.
Bernard Meade also runs surveys with LimeSurvey to find out how to improve on the already popular 3D Printing Showcase held recently in the University.
If you’d like to know more about LimeSurvey, please contact Andy Tseng at ITS Research.
By Paul Mignone
This drop-In session was a big one for many reasons. Dinesh Kantheti, the mastermind behind the 3inter smart printer, gave attendees an interactive class about 3D printer hardware and usage. He demonstrated how 3D printers work and how to use them effectively to produce the best quality print possible. Given that this guy has been building and selling his own brand of printers, you couldn’t ask for a better teacher in our opinion!
Dinesh doing what he does best!
Second, with the upcoming formation of the 3D Printing Research Working Group (3DPRWG), we announced the commencement of research groups in the drop-in sessions. Students and non-students are encouraged to partner with researchers to find a project in which 3D printing can be used to achieve better research objectives. Some funding may also be available to help the research projects as well.
Two groups have already started in the fields of music and jewelry. If you have a great research idea and are looking to form a research group around it, come to a drop-in session and let’s discuss!
Jewelry Group: Dave and Jackie looking for inspiration!
Music Group: Nick, Jonathan and Kae discuss how to improve the violin!
Engaging academics in social media
In reading part 1, I’ll now outline some very basic tips and tricks across three channels: Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube.
Follow your favourite academics, communities, organisations, businesses, journalists, news agencies.
Use:
- Sharing moments: live-tweeting and picture sharing in real time (especially handy for conferences which have their own #hashtag)
- Sharing information: linking out to a blog-post, Journal Article, an Event, or newspaper article.
- Social currency: connecting to other professionals, organisations, communities. You can ask for promotion (e.g. a retweet), name their contribution to an event you’ve organised (thanks to @!), invite them for collaborations. This works well as there’s bidirectional profit; they receive a plug from you, you might receive one back. This also aids transparency - all active agents are visible to the public.
Tips:
- Be concise and snappy with your tweets. They’re designed to be bite-sized. New research shows that the perfect length is around 100 characters!
- Join a #hashtag community! e.g. if you’re writing about Higher Education, use the #HigherEd tag! Check this page for more academic hashtags communities.
- When tweeting a user directly, use their handle at the beginning of the tweet e.g. “@heyDejan Hi, could you please RT my last tweet? Thanks!”
- If you want all your followers to see the above tweet, put a full stop in front of the handle (e.g. “.@heyDejan Hi…”) or use the handle elsewhere in the tweet (e.g. “Hi @heyDejan). Placing the handle at the beginning of the tweet means that only those following both accounts (e.g. yours and @heyDejan) will be able to see it on their feed.
LSE also have you covered on academic blogging!
Uses:
- Informal blogging: quick blog-posts with photos depicting an idea, reflection, problem or past event.
- Formal blogging: longer, reflective posts which capture an idea; its successes, problems, history and future.
- Mediums: Tumblr allows for a number of various mediums in blogging, including text posts, photos, videos, links, sound bites, quotes, dialogues.
note: Tumblr is just a proxy for a blogging platform. Feel free to play around with others such as WordPress.
Tips:
- Picture/Text ratio should be 50:50: plenty of eye-candy for your readers. Check here for a master-map of all ideal lengths for most channels! (Thank you Kevan Lee!)
- (Hash)tags: group similar posts together. For both archiving and promoting.
- Engagement: if you want somebody specific to read your post, mention them somewhere in it and ask them to check/edit the post before publication. You get a fresh pair of eyes and the pair you always wanted in one hit!
- Narrowcasting: you have your blogpost up, now what? It’s time to start feeding it to different communities. Tweet it out (include @ who might dish out a retweet), publish it on your Facebook (if you’re actually using it), or even email it around to people you think would be interested!
- Sign-Off: at the end of every blogpost write a sentence or two about how you can be reached. See the end of this blog as an example.
Following the rise of TED, videos are more popular than ever!
Uses:
- Vlogging: Can it be academic? Good question! This guy seems to think so.
- Posting interviews: these are short (1-2 minutes max) videos of people at events; their thoughts, feelings, expectations, inventions, ideas.
- Advertising: videos are a great form of marketing as they showcase what your events are like and what they can expect. Sometimes content is more fun, accessible and personable in video form compared to text.
Our very own David F. Flanders’ TedxHamburg Talk on 3D Printing
Tips:
- Video style: make sure you develop one with your own distinct voice.
- Editing: YouTube has a decent editing system.
- Privacy: YouTube has three main privacy systems (public, unlist, private). Public videos are accessible to anyone and can be searched through the YouTube search bar and Google more generally. Unlisted videos can only be accessed through the video’s custom link. You can email, tweet or embed unlisted videos to your specific audience. Private videos can only be viewed by the owner of the YouTube account (handy for editing).
Stay tuned for part 3, ‘the road ahead’ & more #ResBaz social media developments in the months ahead!
Research can be ‘bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog-posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s ‘Research Community Coordinator’ who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers! Here’s the full list.
Engaging academics in social media.
140 Characters is the new black, or perhaps the new leather elbow patch, for the eager and active academic. Unfortunately, most academics have been slow in grasping this realisation.
Image can be purchased and viewed here. Owned by CartoonStock.
On February 15th 2014, the New York Times published, “Professors, We Need You!” by columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, Nicholas Kristof. Kristof asserts that “professors today have a growing number of tools available to educate the public, from online courses to blogs to social media. Yet academics have been slow to cast pearls through Twitter and Facebook”. He reminds that it was nonscholars who instilled a breath of fresh air into ‘lectures’ through the internet phenomenon, TED Talk. Online lecture series which have no particular 'research impact’ but are talk of the town and a bragging right when placed in a room of academics.
So why aren’t academics in like with social media? Kristof responds that most Ph.D. programs reproduce a culture which “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”. A culture of “exclusivity” - writing and publishing for each other and superiors as opposed to the public. This is at odds with social media; an operation built on openness, public discourse, information sharing, collaboration, networks and virtual communities.
Probably what academics imagine Twitter being like
I would also assert that perhaps academics view social media as immature, frivolous, procrastination, cats and unacademic. A view that, admittedly, may sometimes be true. However, social media’s birthplace is the World Wide Web and the possibilities are therefore boundless. Niche communities pop up faster than you can retweet your favourite academics’ latest musing. And yes, academics are on Twitter! It’s also worth mentioning that The London School of Economics is so far ahead of the curb that they even have a “Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities” guide made available.
Front page of LSE’s Twitter Guide for Academics & Researchers
So if LSE can do it, why can’t we here at The University of Melbourne? If harnessed correctly, social media has the potential to revolutionise the way academics see, do and understand research. In fact, the World’s first Twitter only academic journal is already in the works!
In part 2 of “140 Characters is the New Black” I’ll very quickly go through three social media channels (Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube) and outline some handy tips and tricks to get you started on your new-found academic journey!
And in the conclusion to the trilogy, part 3 of “140 Characters is the New Black” will examine the road ahead. What are the practical things we can do to get professors and academic staff out of the nest and tweeting.
Research can be ‘bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog-posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s ‘Research Community Coordinator’ who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers! Here’s the full list.
By Damien Irving.
Let’s say you’ve just attended your first ever Software Carpentry bootcamp, or you’ve been speaking to a colleague who told you how awesome they are. No matter your position on the academic ladder (i.e. Masters student through to Professor), if you think your colleagues or students would benefit from a crash course in computer programming, we can help you out. Here’s three case studies to show you how a bootcamp can go from an idea to reality:
1. Student driven bootcamp
Through helping researchers with their programming, we frequently come into contact with students who tell us that many of the people in their lab/department would benefit from a bootcamp. For our November 2013 bootcamp (see the website and tumblr post), we got 7 of these students together and booked a teaching space with 7 tables (each of which could accommodate 6-7 chairs). We then asked those students to bring along enough of their colleagues to fill one table. We ended up with one or more tables from meteorology, biology, biomechanics, finance and medicine, which made for a really great event.
@ITS_Res Remember this? A great panorama shot from our first ever @swcarpentry bootcamp… #HackerWin #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/xeS08XkTD8
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
April 2, 2014
2. Co-hosted bootcamp
A couple of students on the committee of COMBINE - a bioinformatics group aimed at students and early-career researchers in Australia - heard about the November 2013 bootcamp and asked if we’d like to co-host a bootcamp for the Melbourne bioinformatics community (i.e. they’d provide the people, and we’d provide the teaching). We said yes of course, and the event was a big success (read all about it here).
.@DrClimate introducing the first session of the #swcarpentry Bioinformatics bootcamp! @swcarpentry #resbaz pic.twitter.com/eXfa8Tqq8M
— ITS Research (@ITS_Res)
March 17, 2014
3. Lecturer driven bootcamp
Matthew Dimmock is a lecturer in medical imaging at Monash Uni. He came across Software Carpentry one day when searching for ways to increase the programming skills of his students. They put him in contact with us, and Matthew came along to the November 2013 bootcamp as a helper to see what happens at a typical bootcamp. He liked what he saw, so we are now helping him organise a bootcamp for medical imaging researchers.
So if you’re in Melbourne and would like to hold a bootcamp for your research discipline, please get in touch either via email (research.bazaar@gmail.com) or by coming along to Hacky Hour to have a chat! (You can also check out our Software Carpentry FAQs for more details.)
By Damien Irving.
In March 2014 a group of 40 bioinformatics researchers from around Melbourne attended one of our Software Carpentry bootcamps (see the website for details). As is the case in many of the sciences, the amount of programming that biologists are required to do has increased rapidly in recent years. Since programming skills aren’t typically taught at an undergraduate level, most Masters, PhD and post-doc researchers are self-taught. They consequently spend hours doing things that should take minutes, reinvent a lot of wheels, and at the end of it all still don’t know if their results are reliable.
Anna shares her thoughts on the bioinformatics bootcamp… (she has also put her hand up to join our R teaching team - thanks Anna!)
Recognising this as a problem for their members, Scott and Harriet from COMBINE - a bioinformatics group aimed at students and early-career researchers in Australia - came along to Hacky Hour to ask about co-hosting a bootcamp for their discipline. We were of course more than happy to help out, as co-hosting with student groups is one of our favourite ways to deliver a bootcamp. The student group (in this case COMBINE) has the contacts and social networks that we don’t have, while we have the experience in teaching this stuff that they don’t have, so it’s a win-win! Since Harriet had previously put her hand up to join our Python teaching team, she gave a short lesson at the end of the bootcamp about the Biopython package, which proved to be a very popular addition to the regular teaching materials.
Harriet from @combine_au introduces #Biopython to the bootcamp participants. @swcarpentry @ITS_Res #HackerWin #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/MGAJr2uTPW
— Damien Irving (@DrClimate)
March 26, 2014
If you attended the COMBINE bootcamp then you are of course more than welcome to attend Hacky Hour to get further assistance with your programming. Like Harriet and Anna, you might also like to join one of our teaching teams and help others with their coding. If you didn’t attend this bootcamp but like the sound of what they’re about, please get in touch (research.bazaar@gmail.com) and we can talk about putting on a bootcamp for your student group, department or lab!