Data Expeditions Projects
This data expedition focused on biological senses, in particular, musicality. The students read and summarized four scientific articles in discussion groups to build their background knowledge when it comes to how humans and animals use pitch and rhythm in music, language, and songs. We then had each student use headphones...
Graduate Students: Alyvia Martinez and Danae Diaz (adapted from Granger and De La Mater 2022) Sponsoring Faculty: Dr. Stephen Nowicki Undergraduate Course: Biology 268-Mechanisms of Animal Behavior Overview: Our Data Expedition focused on introducing students to the application of circular data in regard to animal navigation. Students worked in groups...
Graduate Students: Aeran Coughlin and Richard J Wong Sponsoring Faculty: Danae Diaz Undergraduate Course: Biology 290S – 3: “Biology By Design” This data expedition focused on plant communities, ecological data exploration, quantifying diversity, linear and generalized linear models, and ordination. Prior to the data expedition, students collected field data in...
The course was designed as a Data Expedition to familiarize senior-level undergraduates with data collection and analysis. We ran the course during the lab section of BIOL 546L on the topic of hair as a mammalian adaptation. Students created testable hypotheses, compared fur/hair samples between species, and graphed their group’s...
This data expedition focused on biological senses, in particular, musicality. The students read and summarized four scientific articles in discussion groups to build their background knowledge when it comes to how humans and animals use pitch and rhythm in music, language, and songs. We then had each student use headphones...
This data expedition focused on animal navigation, specifically the mechanisms by which organisms orient themselves in the direction they need to move. The students gathered their own orientation data using pill bugs, and in the process learned common experimental methods to test hypotheses about orientation, as well as statistical methods...
This data expedition focused on biological senses, in particular, musicality. The students read and summarized four scientific articles in discussion groups to build their background knowledge when it comes to how humans and animals use pitch and rhythm in music, language, and songs. We then had each student use headphones...
This data expedition focused on animal navigation, specifically the mechanisms by which organisms orient themselves in the direction they need to move. The students gathered their own orientation data using pill bugs, and in the process learned common experimental methods to test hypotheses about orientation, as well as statistical methods...
This project, conducted during a two-week workshop, combined data extraction from a database of early modern print materials (Early English Books Online; EEBO) with the translation of archival evidence through visualizations of networks relating to prominent figures in the trade.
In ecology and watershed sciences, large datasets often come from a variety of sources like continuous automated sensors, water grab samples, and community-collected scientific data. Overcoming these challenges is critical to explore the prevalence, persistence, and impact of degraded water quality on human society and wildlife. This project exposes students...
This data expedition focused on the mechanisms animals use to orient using environmental stimuli, the methods that scientists use to test hypotheses about orientation, and the statistical methods used with circular orientation data. Students collected their own data set during the class period, performed hypothesis testing on their data using...
We introduced students to spatial analysis in QGIS and R using location data from two whale species tagged with satellite transmitters. Students were given satellite tracks from five Cuvier’s beaked whales (Ziphius cavirostris) and five short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) tagged off the North Carolina coast. Students then used RStudio...
Understanding how to generate, analyze, and work with datasets in the humanities is often a difficult task without learning how to code or program. In humanities centered courses, we often privilege close reading or qualitative analysis over other methods of knowing, but by learning some new quantitative techniques we better prepare...
This two-week teaching module in an introductory-level undergraduate course invites students to explore the power of Twitter in shaping public discourse. The project supplements the close-reading methods that are central to the humanities with large-scale social media analysis. This exercise challenges students to consider how applying visualization techniques to a...
KC and Patrick led two hands-on data workshops for ENVIRON 335: Drones in Marine Biology, Ecology, and Conservation. These labs were intended to introduce students to examples of how drones are currently being used as a remote sensing tool to monitor marine megafauna and their environments, and how machine learning...
The aim of this data expedition was to give students an introduction to stable isotopes and how the data can be used to understand trophic dynamics. Within a 3-hour lab students were introduced to methane seeps and the difference between photosynthetic and chemosynthetic carbon, before working through an analysis of...
This Data Expedition introduced hypothesis-driven data analysis in R and the concept of circular data, while providing some tools for importing it and analyzing it in R. After exploring a simple dataset to learn these tools, we applied what we learned to two real examples of circular datasets: one testing for magnetoreception in salmon...
Our aim was to introduce students to the wealth of possibilities that human genotyping and sequencing hold by illustrating firsthand the power of these datasets to identify genetic relatives, using the story of the Golden State Killer’s capture with public genetic databases. Graduate Students: Ryan Campbell and Jenn Coughlan, Duke Biology Course: BIO190S,...
Large publicly available environmental databases are a tremendous resource for both scientists and the general public interested in climate trends and properties. However, without the programming skills to parse and interpret these massive datasets, significant trends may remain hidden from both scientists and the public. In this data exploration, students,...
This data expedition explores the local (ego) patent citation networks of three hybrid vehicle-related patents. The concept of patent citations and technological development is a core theme in innovation and entrepreneurship, and the purpose of these network explorations is to both quantitatively and visually assess how innovations are connected and...
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