Digital Scholar Series 2025 - Semester 1

24 Dec 2024
poster for digital scholar series
24 Dec 2024

2025 Semester 1 Digital Scholar Series

The Digital Library Services (DLS) department of UCT Libraries will be restarting our Digital Scholar Series in the first semester of 2025. We will showcase some of the digital practices and tools available to enhance your research skills, with an ongoing focus on managing your research data efficiently. These sessions are open to all postgraduate researchers and staff working within any field of study at UCT. If you are interested in us presenting tailored sessions directly to your students and researchers please contact us at dls@uct.ac.za.

Our primary focus in the first half of the year will be on topics covering the beginning stages of the research process, such as data management plans (DMPs) and best practices for efficiently capturing and managing research data. Topics covered deal with the management of digital materials for research (what some of us call ‘data’) and touch on digital topics throughout the research lifecycle. The webinars are aimed at making your digital scholarship more efficient, so that your data gives you less hassle and you have more time to focus on your teaching, learning and research.   

After registering for an event, you will receive an email with a calendar invite attached. All sessions will start at 1 PM with the topics and dates listed below. The sessions will be hosted on MS Teams and will last 45 minutes, with an extra 15 minutes for questions or discussions. DLS staff will be present to moderate the chat and to help answer your questions as they come up. 

See the full schedule and register. 

  • Creating Data Management Plans with UCT DMP
    • Wed 2025-02-05
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-plan-dmp
    • "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is the age-old phrase; this is where Data Management Plans (DMPs) are really helpful. Rather than just being another box to tick in your MoU, a DMP helps you figure out how you will work with and manage your data throughout your research project. You may not have all the answers yet, and some questions will be tough, but taking the time to try to answer them will save you from moments of failure in the future. This session takes you through UCT DMP , our online tool that guides you through creating your data management plan. After this session, you will no longer fear the DMP. If you cannot make it to this session, look out for the repeat that will happen soon.
  • A Repeat: Creating Data Management Plans with UCT DMP
    • Wed 2024-02-12
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-plan-repeat
    • In this repeat of our ever-popular Data Management Planning webinar, we look at using the UCT DMP tool to create your own DMP. Rather than just being another box to tick in your MoU, a DMP helps you figure out how you will work with and manage your data throughout your research project. You may still need to get all the answers, and some questions will be tough, but taking the time to try to answer them will save you from moments of failure in the future. This session takes you through UCT DMP, an online tool that guides you through creating your data management plan. After this session, you will no longer fear the DMP.
  • Revising your Data Management Plan with UCT DMP
    • Wed 2025-02-19
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-revise-dmp
    • Completing a Data Management Plan at the start of your research project is the best way to start managing your data. But at some point during your project, it might be time to do some updates and rethink your answers. As the UCT DMP platform always keeps your living document editable, this session takes you through updating your DMP with the information you have learned so far during your research project. 
  • Keeping it tidy: Capturing and Discovering your Data Efficiently
    • Wed 2024-03-05
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-capture
    • Taking the right steps at the start of a research project can make all subsequent work much easier. How you collect and capture the information that you need to do your research (your data) is one such step. This session looks at ways to organise what you collect and how to best capture it. We cover subjects from using forms for data capture to file naming and recognizing the value of metadata. After this session, you may well see the world in rows and columns.
  • Never name it “final”: Guides on Managing and Storing your Data
    • Wed 2025-03-12
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-manage
    • It is great to have a lot of data, but where and how do you store it so that you can easily manage it? This session presents several options on where to store data during your research projects and offers some handy guides on how to organise it. After this session, you won't have to spend hours looking for that elusive file.
       
  • Working with Sensitive Data at UCT
    • Wed 2025-03-19
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-data-sensitive
    • Data is powerful and with great power comes great responsibility. In this session, we explore sensitive data, how to identify it and how it should be handled during a research project. We explore topics such as de-identification, secure storage solutions, open licenses and appropriate embargos to assist you with ensuring that you are not on the wrong side of ethics and laws. After this session, you should be more sensitive about working with data! 
       
  • Is this thing on? Getting your data ready for Analysis
    • Wed 2025-03-26
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-data-prep
    • Once your data is captured, it is time to start analysing it. No matter your research project, it helps to ensure that the data is ready to be wrangled, re-formatted, examined, queried, etc. In this session, we look at how you can ensure that your data is ready for the rigorous process of turning it into information.
       
  • GIS @ UCTL
  • To DOI or not to DOI? Sharing and Publishing Research Openly with ZivaHub
    • Wed 2025-04-16
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-publish-zivahub
    • Research outputs become more valuable once they are shared, allowing others to use them to glean information, build knowledge, and acknowledge the original authors in a scholarly manner. In today's academic landscape, you get credit for publishing the data you produce and share, leading to new opportunities for study. To do so, your data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). We look at how you can make your data FAIR by sharing and publishing it on  UCT's data repository ZivaHub . After this session, DOIs might be your new best friends.
       
  • How ZivaHub can help you share and publish your thesis data
    • Wed 2025-04-23
    • Time: 1PM SAST
    • Register: https://uct.ac.za.libcal.com/calendar/libraryevents/dss-publish-thesis-data   
    • Is it the end of your research project and time to hand in your thesis? Do you have some data you have gathered and analysed that you need to share as part of your thesis submission? In this session, we look at how the UCT Open Data repository, ZivaHub , can assist you with sharing and publishing your data. Do you need to get a DOI to put in your manuscript? Do you need to have your examiners access the data privately before publishing? Do you need to make sure that the data is only published at a later date? After this session, publishing your data will be easier than doing your bibliography.