UCL ISH runs code[heritage+culture] short course to develop digital skills within the sector

The culture and heritage sectors are increasingly generating and making use of data, requiring those involved to develop skills to manage, analyse, and visualise it—or communicate with those who do. The course was developed to meet the increasing demand for skills in communicating data within the culture and heritage sectors, and was led by Dr Josep Grau-Bove and Dr Scott Allan Orr.

The 50 course participants were guided in developing a basic coding ability using R (with RStudio), focusing on key skills that underpin the use of any coding-based approach to working with data.

The course was attended by a variety of culture and heritage professionals across the sector, who learned basic commands for data management, analysis, and visualisation, as well as how to read data into it and extract outputs, such as visualisations.

Feedback from participants included:

“I will definitely use R in doing statistics on the analytical data collected with different instruments, and to manipulate spectra."

The case studies really opened my eyes to what is possible with R in my research and conservation work. I am looking forward to becoming more fluent using R, and to be able to create functions to make my life easier and hopefully those of colleagues too!"“

“I will definitely try to promote R as it is an amazing tool for cultural heritage data handling."