Author Archives: NYU Shanghai Library

Take part in Library Student Survey 2018

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What does the Library mean to you? A place for you to study with friends? A book bank where you can find a kindred spirit? A battlefield in times of essay dues and project deadlines?

Your story matters to us! Tell us about your experience now to give us an opportunity to improve your experience.

Take part in Library Student Survey 2018

Win attractive prizes

If you have completed the Library Student Survey, we would like to offer a small gift – come to our Library front desk. You can also take part in a lucky draw to win attractive prizes below by submitting your email address at the end of the survey.

FIRST PRIZE, 1 winner: 20″ trolley luggage (Minecraft themed)

SECOND PRIZE, 3 winners: Bluetooth Speaker

THIRD PRIZE, 5 winners: Earbuds

 

Manhattan

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Drs Santtila and Weslake present this film to prompt discussion about assessing the value of a creation, specifically, how that assessment iregards the creator’s character.  If a creator’s poor ethical choices are revealed over time, how do those affect criticism of the creation?

Movies prompt conversation, whether disagreement, emotion, or endorsement.

The list of titles and links below are a gateway to read about ethics, art, and criticism.  Later links also explore Manhattan’s history, architecture, or urban design.  Listen to more music by the movie’s composer.  Ask at the library for travelogues, memoirs, or novels about different boroughs.

Continue reading →

Planned Downtime of Online Resources

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Most online library systems will be unavailable starting at 17 March (Saturday) 5 AM. This outage is due to University work on Bobst Library’s power supply.

Services affected include library catalog (BobCat), ejournals, ebooks and databases. Please plan your research accordingly. In the meantime, our library website will still be available.

We are expecting the above systems to be restored and available by 18 March (Sunday) 3 AM. The exact restoration time may vary depending on any technical issues that may arise.

For the most up-to-date information about the system status during the outage, visit our Libraries’ System Status Update Page.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Recommended Titles on Data Visualization

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  1. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward R. Tufte
  2. The Elements of Graphing Data, by William S. Cleveland
  3. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication, by Alberto Cairo
  4. The Big Book of Dashboards: Visualizing Your Data Using Real-World Business Scenarios, by Steve Wexler, Jeffrey Shaffer, and Andy Cotgreave

I have four books to recommend for data visualization that combine depth of statistical reasoning with aesthetically appealing images, good writing, and ample examples.

The first two – The Visual Display of Quantitative Information & The Elements of Graphing Data – are all time classics. They are books that laid the foundations for the practitioners of the field; early works that are never outdated, even in the digital era. Edward Tufte has other great books which we left out of this list.

The Truthful Art is a very nice introductory reading to the general audience. It provides in-depth analysis & examination of pieces of visualizations, and interesting things like the same data presented in many ways. – Yun Dai, Educational Technologist for Data Services Continue reading →

Try BobCat Beta now!

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We are happy to announce the beta release of the new BobCat interface.

Click on ‘Try BobCat Beta’ tab on NYU Shanghai Library website

BobCat is NYU’s branded name for our Library discovery platform!

The new BobCat Beta interface has a modern look and feel, and offers new features in addition to all the features of the current interface (BobCat Classic). Both Classic and Beta will run simultaneously through the entire spring semester.

Watch a 5-minute walkthrough of the features of BobCat Beta. Continue reading →

Noteworthy Business Titles

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  1. Redirect: changing the stories we live by, by Timothy D Wilson
  2. The Ideas Industry: How Pessimists, Partisans, and Plutocrats Are Transforming the Marketplace of Ideas, by Daniel W. Drezner
  3. Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley, by Emily Chang
  4. Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World, by Melissa A. Schilling
  5. Fifty Million Rising: The New Generation of Working Women Transforming the Muslim World by Saadia Zahidi

This month, we have titles for improving yourself, as well as understanding groups of people. Drezner’s book on the ideas industry is an interesting take on what drives a large part of business – the ideas industry. This book was a recommendation from a fellow colleague.

Another book published by our NYU family: Melissa Schiling is the Herzog Family Professor of Management, and Professor of Management & Organizations at NYU Stern School of Business. It was a pleasant surprise to learn the January’s 5 noteworthy business titles were appreciated. Share this with someone you’re thinking of! –– Edward Lim, Reference & Research Services Librarian for Business

Continue reading →

The Big Short

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This movie makes me think about so many topics all at once.  There are the obvious categories of finance, markets, and regulation.  Then there are the issues of privilege and access, both to information and to money.  Or questions of personality and communication: who is working hard, quietly or alone, to explore the facts while others are loudly selling catchy phrases in ignorance?

I hope you are inspired to follow one of these lines of inquiry by watching a video or reading a book below.  If another idea sparks your interest, the library can help you locate diverse opinions for supporting your exploration.

What does the Big Short make you think about?

Continue reading →

R Resources for Self-paced Learning

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In the following weeks, we will continue to release a series of posts to introduce resources on statistical computing, data visualization and to help you catch up with the ever-changing industry trends.

We therefore present to you the Data Resources Mini Series – Not Just Buzzwords.

(Source: https://xkcd.com/1838/)

# secret recipes of learning R before we start

# Always read the R official documents first.

# Stack Overflow and Google are your friends.

# Do a project. Choose a complex one.

# Be a teacher. Explain something to someone else.

# Learn something even harder than you actually need but in related areas. Then return to your problems.

Wait, did I say “come to the Library workshops” in the secret recipes? If you did not make to the R workshops, here are the workshop notes.

Alright. Let’s take a look at some tutorials and blogs for learning R with general purposes. We have something for everyone from absolute beginners to more experienced users.

Next time we will share books and blogs on data visualization. Stay tuned!

01

the starting point

An introduction to R, CRAN project
Everything you need to know to get you started.

 

02

knowing enough to get by

RStudio Cheat Sheets

Cheat Sheets of using R for various purposes from the Base R all the way to deep learning with R.

Quick-R
A quick access to R, especially if you are from Stata, SAS, SPSS etc. 

03

using R in projects

R for Data Science, Garrett Grolemund and Hadley Wickham  

Don’t miss the exercises.

Advanced R, Hadley Wickham 

R programming.

04

Coursera online classes

Data Science Specialization, John Hopkins University

R programming + data analysis + research workflow.

Statistics with R Specialization, Duke University

Some people find the JHU courses too R heavy. This specialization focuses on teaching statistics while people learn to use R through projects.

05

blogs

Rbloggers

R news and tutorials for numerous topics.

The R Graph Gallery

R graphs and codes by chart types. Previously had a focus on visualization with ggplot2 but not limited to that.

Previously…

Stata Resources for Self-paced Learning

 

*Source of cover image: https://smbc-comics.com/?id=2613

presented by Yun Dai

 (yun.dai@nyu.edu)

 

edited by Scotty Sun

Meet your Instructional Technologists

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We are dedicated to helping faculty utilize instructional and research tools and technologies for teaching and research. We develop Technology Enhanced Education (TEE) initiatives that assist the community in exploring innovative ways to impact teaching and learning with instructional technology.

Adrian Hodge
Head of Research and Instructional Technology Services

Adrian manages the RITS team towards the development of a range of educational technology and data projects at NYU Shanghai. He has an information management background in government, health and education sectors in the UK and Asia.

Adrian works in close consultation with faculty to understand pedagogy needs in the use of instructional technologies as well as the development of a range of TEE (Technology Enhanced Education) experiments and initiatives in fully online and blended learning courses, working closely with instructional technologists at NYU Shanghai and across the NYU’s global locations.

Yun Dai
Educational Technologist for Data Services

Yun joined the team as a data services consultant following her Technology Enhancement Education Fellowship with the Library.  She supports statistical computing and visualization tools through workshops, in-class instructions, consultations and online guides for faculty, students and research staff.

Yun has developed a range of data resources, and cooperates with other parties on research projects utilizing her data skills. She built up and co-manages the Chinese Datasets Archive with the Center for Data Science and Analytics.

Yun holds her Bachelor’s degree from Peking University and her Master’s from Columbia University (GSAS).

Noel Konagai
Technology Enhanced Education Fellow

Noel is a Technology Enhanced Education Fellow at NYU Shanghai who explores applications of machine learning, VR, and AR in an instructional setting.

Noel joined the Research and Instructional Technology team after graduating from the inaugural class of 2017 at NYU Shanghai. His passion lies in artificial intelligence and machine learning. His workshops are centered around the skills that are most in demand in data science.

Aside from being a data freak, Noel also loves Chinese tea and is passionate about learning languages.

Fan Luo
Faculty Technology Specialist

Fan is a Faculty Technology Specialist at NYU Shanghai. She holds a Master degree in Information Science and has worked as consultant, designer, and project manager on educational projects.

Fan joined NYU Shanghai in fall 2016 and works closely with faculty to facilitate teaching through the application of various instructional technologies including GIS, data visualization, LMS, blended and online learning etc. She develops and delivers workshops based upon the request of faculty.

Together with the Research and Instructional Technology (RITS) team and specialists over the global communities of NYU, Fan collaborates with colleagues to provide technical support and pedagogical consultation for faculty.

Angela Wang
Teaching and Learning Technology Supervisor

Angela is a Teaching and Learning Technology Supervisor at NYU Shanghai who works closely with faculty and students as well as instructional technologists in Shanghai and New York.

She consults with faculty to support daily operation of academic tools such as NYU Classes, NYU Stream, E-Textbooks and other systems in their teaching and research. She also facilitates workshops on NYU academic tools and other technology skills such as Microsoft Office for faculty, students, and staff at NYU Shanghai.

Angela holds bachelor degrees in both Computer Science and English from East China Normal University.

Mia Zhuo
Senior Faculty Technology Specialist

Mia is a consultant and designer who works closely with faculty in conceptualization, development, and redesign of courses that are both offered in classroom settings and online formats.

She holds her Double Masters in Global Media and Communications from LSE and USC, and leverages her skills to help faculty and students incorporate multimedia, among other digital tools, in their teaching, research and learning.

She also facilitates workshops on video production, animation, and digital expressions for faculty, students, and staff at NYU Shanghai. In addition to consulting and training, she provides support for the pedagogical use of NYU Classes.