Data Carpentry

Data Carpentry is a new project funded by NSF BIO Centers and DataOne. It is designed to teach researchers basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data.

Workshops are designed for learners with little to no prior knowledge of programming, shell scripting, or command line tools.

iDigBio recently hosted a Data Carpentry workshop, and their website has good documentation.

It occurs to me that this workshop offers an interesting opportunity to train both scientists and artists, while providing the possibility of interaction.

Looking at the rapidly expanding pool of data as a resource, or a medium, offers interesting potential art/science collisions. For example, Artist-Scientists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg lead Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They created a compelling art project from wind data that you have probably seen, as well as many internet data visualizations , including Many Eyes, an on-line data visualization tool, Wikipedia, chat history and e-mail visualizations.

More thoughts about data visualization here.