A Microscopic Look at ResBaz 2016 Attendees
By : Yuandra Ismiraldi
It’s finally here !
You may remember that for the ResBaz 2016 application process we asked you to fill forms which you might have found ridiculously long. Nonetheless, thanks to your efforts we managed to gather a very good reading of what ResBaz 2016 looked like.
Diversity
One of our goals for ResBaz was to be as diverse as possible and have attendees from a variety of fields and backgrounds. We had an amazing 650+ applicants for ResBaz 2016 Melbourne and after a gruelling selection process we had 200 attendees! 40 % of the attendees were male and 60% were female, with majority being 21-35 years old. (We had multiple people above 40 year and under 21 attending too!).
Masters, PhDs and Postdocs made up the majority of attendees - with some undergraduates and professionals also in the mix. Most were from the University of Melbourne yet we also have representatives from other areas such as Tasmania and Queensland (a round of applause for travelling all the way!).
We found that ResBaz 2016 had a very good mix of research fields. Attendees come from Medicine, Biology, Science, Law, Economics, Education, History, Creative Arts, and many more.
Windows users are abundant, followed by OSX and Linux users. The attendees are also evenly split between iOS and Android.
Learning
Another fundamental goal was learning. We wanted to create a fun and safe learning environment where everyone can “upskill” in digital research skills. This is important as we consider ResBaz a place to introduce new tools and learn how to code - we found that most of the attendees were new to programming and not familiar with command line and version control.
In ResBaz 2016, we offered various trainings from our catalogue (See it here). We found out that Python, R, and Matlab were still our most popular offers but interest was picking up for tools such as D3, data acquisition and cleaning, NLTK, 3D Slicer, and Inventor. We also found that attendees were very interested in learning about our other trainings such social media scraping, latex, Galaxy, RedCap, Omeka, and Gephi.
One of the reasons why we administered the survey was to see what kind of digital tools our attendees used.
For data collection, we found that Google Forms and Survey Monkey were still the top tools to collect data followed closely by R, Python, and scraping library such as Beautiful Soup.
For data cleaning, Excel ranked as the most widely used tool - with a few people using R and Python for programming data cleaning. Excel was also the most used tool for data analysis, followed by the trio programming languages R, Python, and Matlab - and SPSS. The trio also made up the most used programming languages followed by Javascript (where are you Java/Scala people?).
We also noted that most of attendees haven’t moved to the cloud yet. The desktop version of Microsoft Word was still the most used document editing platform - with a small percentage use Latex. Endnote followed by Mendeley was the most used reference manager (some even mentioned that they don’t manage their references - *shocking*) . Microsoft Paint took the throne as the most used graphic editing tools.
Future Learning
We also asked attendees what they think will be useful for future research work and what they need more learning in. This was to get a feel about what our attendees need and see how we then can modify our trainings to cater these needs.
Recording and digitisation tools were ranked as the most useful research technologies, followed by genomics, microscopy, and biological imaging. Interestingly, we also observed some interest in virtual reality alongside astronomical instrumentation. We also found that most of our attendees want to up-skill themselves in our trio of programming languages (Matlab, Python, R) followed by 3D tools and data visualisation tools, such as D3.
Overall, we were very happy with the diversity in our attendees! Rest assured that we will use these inputs to provide better support so you can use digital tools to make your research life easier.
Stay tuned for more insights from our global survey which will show what researchers all over the world are thinking about digital tools ! Meanwhile, check our calendar of events and trainings here !
