The Data @ Rice Workshop Series, sponsored by Fondren Library and the Center for Research Computing, provides hands-on training in the basics of organizing, documenting, analyzing, and visualizing your data. Fall sessions will be offered via Zoom and Canvas. Course descriptions and registration can be found on the library website.
 

Do you need to deposit the data related to an article in a repository ahead of publication? Are you interested in increasing the discoverability and access to your data? The Rice Digital Scholarship Archive (RDSA) might be a solution.

The RDSA provides global access to research and scholarship produced at Rice University. The archive supports a wide variety of material including datasets.
 

Benefits of using the RDSA include:

Datasets can be submitted to the RDSA using this webform. Have questions or want to learn more? Contact researchdata@rice.edu.

 

In her dissertation, Dr. Portia Hopkins focused on how activists from marginalized communities preserve historic sites; now, as Rice’s new CLIR/DLF postdoctoral research associate in African American data curation, she will be working with Black community groups to document their stories and curate and preserve their digital artifacts. Dr. Hopkins came to Rice through a program sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) and the Digital Library Federation (DLF) that enables recent Ph.D. recipients to develop skills in libraries and archives. Fondren Library and Rice’s Center for Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) partnered to propose and oversee the postdoc, building on a prior partnership to curate archival collections.  Hopkins’ mentors at Rice include Dr. Anthony Pinn, Dr. Lisa Spiro, Maya Reine, and Amanda Focke. 

After starting at Rice in July, Dr. Hopkins is now helping teachers develop lessons for the new African American Studies course recently approved by the Texas Board of Education, highlighting archival resources available at the Woodson Research Center. In collaboration with the Convict Leasing and Labor Project (CLLP), she and a Fondren Fellow will create an interactive map telling the story of the Sugarland 95, a group of African American forced-labor prisoners leased to sugar plantations in the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries whose graves were discovered at the former site of the Imperial State Farm Prison. In addition, Dr. Hopkins will help coordinate an oral history project, assist community groups in managing and preserving their data, and teach workshops on oral history and data curation. Through dedicated research time, she will also turn her dissertation into a book. 

Dr. Hopkins received her PhD from the University of Maryland in American Studies. Prior to coming to Rice, she taught at several community colleges and universities and worked at the University of Alabama Libraries’ Special Collections. Dr. Hopkins is particularly excited about the opportunity to explore different career possibilities afforded by a PhD and to work more closely with community members on how to organize and make sense of their data.

 

International Open Access Week is October 19-25. There will be no in-person programming this year, but DSS does want to use the event as an opportunity to highlight Fondren's support for open access (OA). The library supports OA in a number of ways, including:

If you have questions or want to learn more about the library's OA initiatives, please contact openaccess@rice.edu.