UH Librarian Accepted to Data Visualization Institute
Wenli Gao was accepted to the Data and Visualization Institute for Librarians.
Wenli Gao, liaison librarian for communication, sociology and anthropology at the University of Houston Libraries, has been accepted to the well-regarded Data and Visualization Institute for Librarians. This is a week-long program that will be held at North Carolina State University this coming May.
The Institute will allow participants to develop the knowledge, skills, and confidence to communicate effectively with faculty and student researchers about their data and to be able to provide useful consultations on course topics. Led by expert instructors, sessions will be interactive and will focus on core concepts, with hands-on exposure to select open source and highly used commercial tools.
According to Gao, “Participation in this program will benefit my own research by enhancing my statistical and textual analysis skills. I currently am working on collection assessment projects and a semantic network analysis project. The training provided by the Institute will assist with the exploration and analysis of these data. Topic modeling and network analysis as outlined in the program will offer new ideas and guidance on my research.”
Additionally, Gao says “Learning how to gather and analyze textual data, as well as visualizing data will help support faculty research and teaching. There is an increasing demand for social media analysis in both the Communication and Anthropology departments. I have been working with advertising classes to visualize social media data to understand consumer sentiment. Knowing how to work with APIs to gather social media data and understanding the capabilities of qualitative data analysis programs will prepare me to better help researchers and students.”