Library Workshops: Home

Come tinker with 3D modeling software, learn design techniques, and see 3D printing in action. Participants will learn how to create a 3D model using free tools and resources. Experience with 3D printing is not required and beginners are encouraged to attend.

Instructor: Max Ofsa

Gain and hone skills with Unity, a virtual reality development software available in the Virtual Environments Studio. This workshop is open to the public. Beginners are encouraged and no coding is required!

Instructor: Jonathan Bradley

Participants will learn about augmented reality and cultivate skills in AR development using Unity, a virtual reality and modeling software. Participants are encouraged to attend the Create a Virtual Reality Experience workshop prior to this session.

Instructor: Jonathan Bradley

Want to record a podcast or a few music tracks? Come learn how to use the audio hardware in Media Design Studio B to get the best quality out of singing, talking, and musical instruments.

Instructor: Alice Rogers

Learn about some basic techniques used in audio editing in this workshop: moving and cutting tracks, grouping, basic audio effects, and best practices for creating awesome podcasts and basic musical recordings. Computers with Adobe Audition and audio files will be provided, but feel free to bring your own. 

Instructor: Alice Rogers

Are you daunted by the task of creating a pitch video for your next entrepreneurial endeavor? In this workshop, we will discuss the content of a pitch video, provide an opportunity for some hands-on editing practice, and show you some of the helpful tools and services offered in Newman Library. The Fusion Studio and Media Design Studio have partnered with the Apex Center for Entrepreneurs to offer this workshop just in time for eChallenge!

Instructors: Kayla McNabb and Sara Sweeney-Bear

Working with a team this semester? This workshop covers the skills and strategies behind coordinating successful group projects. Learn how to hold your team members (and yourself!) accountable, work collaboratively, and manage different tasks.

Instructor: Sara Sweeney-Bear

Copyright is confusing. Whether you’re making music, doing graphic design, cutting a video, or a recording a podcast, finding copyright free materials can help you avoid trouble and increase your creative output. We’ll walk through a diverse set of resources and discuss concepts like fair use to help you get your projects started off right.

Instructors: Julia Feerrar and Kelsey Hammer

Are you a creator making cool stuff? About to embark on a new creative project? Have you thought about how you are sharing or going to share your work with the world? There are a lot of platforms out there, but how do you keep rights and access over your own work? We’ll discuss tips, tricks, and resources for making sure your awesome work reaches the right audiences but also stays yours.

Instructor: Julia Feerrar and Kelsey Hammer

When protecting your intellectual property, where do you even begin? This workshop will provide a broad overview of the different kinds of intellectual property protections, your rights as a student at Virginia Tech, and some of the resources that are available here on campus. 

Instructor: Sara Sweeney-Bear

Long-term projects can be a struggle to manage--especially when working with a team. In this session, we'll cover some tips and tools for creating long-term and short-term goals, managing tasks, and holding each other (and yourself) accountable. 

Instructor: Sara Sweeney-Bear

Looking for tips on creating a professional network, or maybe want some advice on how to word an important email? This workshop covers the best practices for professional communication.

Instructor: Sara Sweeney-Bear

Need to design your own website? Or are you looking to upgrade your digital presence? This workshop will cover the basic concepts and best practices for crafting your web space. Beginners encouraged to attend. 

Instructors: Jonathan Bradley and Trevor Finney

New to Adobe software? Want to make some cool custom cards? Join us for an introduction to the Adobe Suite! We’ll discuss everything Adobe Suite has to offer and then explore basic functions in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign to create custom cards. Great class for beginners, and people looking to take their gift-giving game to the next level.

Instructors: Kayla McNabb and Kelsey Hammer

Need to make a conference poster, but not sure where to start? Making a scientific poster for the hundredth time and not sure how to take it to the next level? In this workshop, we will tackle not only how to create an academic poster but also how to make your poster stand out from the pack. Whether you're new to posters or a seasoned presenter, this session will help you explore how to make a truly effective poster. We will cover fundamental design principles and discuss important decisions like selecting colors and fonts to show how you can design a great looking poster with the ease and freedom of PowerPoint. Last, we will facilitate workshop time so you can plan, draft, create, edit, or even finish an academic poster with hands-on help from Libraries' faculty.

Instructors: Kayla McNabb and Kelsey Hammer

Learn how to make gifs using free, online resources. 

Instructor: Kelsey Hammer

Create appealing infographics to tell your data’s story to a broad audience! Learn tips and tricks to creating appealing and understandable infographics with Adobe Illustrator, and enhance your knowledge of design and typographical principles in the process. We strongly recommend you complete Fundamentals of Data Visualization Design with Adobe Illustrator before taking this unless you are an experienced Illustrator user.

Instructors: Jonathan Briganti and Sarah Tram

Need to create a social media graphic for a club or event? Want to make some custom memes? Or just want to learn Adobe Photoshop? This class is for you! We'll cover design conventions and dimensions for various social media platforms, as well as introductory Photoshop skills.

Instructor: Kelsey Hammer

Learn the fundamentals of this powerful vector graphics creation and editing software! Use tools, palettes, and multiple workspaces to create graphics, charts, diagrams. Along the way, learn basic graphic design, layout, and typography principles and terminology.

Instructors: Kelsey Hammer and Michael Stamper

Take your Adobe Illustrator skills to the next level! Take advantage of advanced features and learn about the distinct challenges of designing for publications, posters, and Web content. We strongly recommend you complete Fundamentals of Data Visualization Design with Adobe Illustrator before taking this unless you are an experienced Illustrator user.

Instructors: Kelsey Hammer and Michael Stamper

Tableau allows you or your students to easily turn research data into detailed, interactive visualizations that tell the story that numbers alone struggle to express. Learn to link directly to your data sources and create a variety of visualizations with intuitive controls. Become familiar with Tableau Desktop, create live interactive visualizations, and showcase your work in dashboards.

Instructor: Jonathan Briganti

Take the skills you've developed with Tableau Desktop and continue to learn new features and uses of Tableau. We will be developing calculated fields, creating dashboard actions, defining parameters, and more! These skills will allow you to further customize your data and visuals, and produce user friendly outputs. We strongly recommend you complete Fundamentals of Data Visualization with Tableau Desktop before taking this unless you are an experienced Tableau user.

Instructor: Jonathan Briganti

Learn about Tableau’s new program that enables anyone to create relational databases, perform advanced data manipulation, and more in a user friendly interface, all without needing to know advanced programming! These skills will help prepare your data for analysis and to be loaded into Tableau Desktop or other analytics tools.

Instructor: Jonathan Briganti

Data is everywhere, from surveys and social media to molecular modeling and journal metrics. Learn the visualization process from start to finish: use Tableau Prep to clean and prepare your data, add Tableau Desktop to create clear and flexible charts and diagrams, then use Adobe Illustrator to customize your visualizations for web, posters and infographics. This workshop covers beginner and intermediate levels; no experience is necessary with Tableau or Illustrator.

Objectives:

• Distinguish between tabular and relational databases and identify advantages of each

• Evaluate data preparation needs and implement in Tableau Prep

• Create 3 types of visualizations in Tableau Desktop

• Apply data visualization design principles to improve initial draft visualizations

• Manipulate vector graphics to create an infographic using Adobe Illustrator

Instructors: Jonathan Briganti, Kelsey Hammer, and Michael Stamper

Learn fundamental Python concepts and procedures and extend their capabilities by using Pandas for data management and exploratory data analysis! Participants do not need to be familiar with Python but should have some prior coding experience in a programming or statistical language.

Instructors:  Nathaniel Porter and Chreston Miller

Import, recode, clean and analyze your data with the powerful and flexible statistical software, Stata for Windows! Describe and draw basic conclusions with ANOVA and linear regression from real-life data in this introductory workshop. Access to a laptop with Stata 14 or 15 is helpful but not required.

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

Create, organize, and manage solo or team NVivo projects! Code qualitative text and audio/video recordings, create mind maps and concept maps to refine concepts, and code data themes to explore themes in your data. We recommend you complete Open text coding before taking this unless you have performed qualitative coding before.

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

Step beyond coding and counting in NVivo! Use sets, queries, maps, diagrams and sentiment to analyze and summarize data you’ve coded in NVivo. We strongly recommend you complete NVivo for Project Building and Management before taking this unless you have coded data in NVivo before.

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

Combine NVivo’s powerful text coding tools with survey and classification to make your data do more! Import surveys from Qualtrics and SurveyMonkey, import case classification sheets, analyze group differences and similarities, and combine text responses with survey data or respondent or source characteristics. We strongly recommend you complete Intermediate NVivo for Exploratory Data Analysis before taking this unless you have completed one or more projects in NVivo before.

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

Qualitative data, such as interviews, documents and observation notes, help researchers discover processes, ideas and needs that could easily be overlooked with surveys and regressions. However, qualitative data are also less structured and are difficult to work with in many analytic packages. Learn core skills for finding, coding, analyzing, presenting and sharing qualitative text data in this 1.5-day workshop.

The first day will focus on understanding the value of different types of text data sources and how they can be combined to create a well-rounded research data corpus, as well as learning and practicing both open and theory-driven coding techniques as individuals and teams.

The second day will provide training on coding and analyzing text data, combining text data with survey or attribute data, and analyzing web and social media data in the powerful qualitative analysis software NVivo.

Workshop Objectives:

• Recognize and evaluate potential primary and secondary qualitative and mixed methods data sources in terms of project goals and practical challenges

• Create a draft plan to implement best practices in qualitative data management, documentation and archival

• Distinguish the processes and purposes of open and theory-based qualitative coding

• Code textual documents independently and collaboratively both by hand and using NVivo CAQDAS software

• Identify at least 2 types of NVIvo queries or diagrams that can help analyze or summarize data for a specific project

• Utilize attribute, classification or survey data to enhance qualitative analysis in NVivo

• Use NCapture to enhance an NVivo project with Facebook, Twitter or web data

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

You can’t share qualitative data, right? Wrong. Come learn how to organize and archive qualitative and mixed methods data, whether your goal is to increase the visibility of your work, improve transparency, enable other researchers to draw on your original data, or just so future you remembers what today you did.

Instructors: Nathaniel Porter and Shane Coleman

Get a hands-on introduction to qualitative (manual) text coding in individual and team settings. Based on a grounded theory approach, open coding allows research subjects to speak for themselves without explicitly relying on our own pre-existing ideas. Code emergent concepts and ideas, justify codes with supporting data, and work with themes to refine codes and build models from coded data.

Instructor: Nathaniel Porter

Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools for using the Python programming language, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

Workshop Objectives:

By the end of this workshop, you will know how to use...

• The Unix Shell

  • Files and directories

  • History and tab completion

  • Pipes and redirection

  • Looping over files

  • Creating and running shell scripts

  • Finding things

• Version Control with Git

  • Creating a repository

  • Recording changes to files: add, commit, …

  • Viewing changes: status, diff, …

  • Ignoring files

  • Working on the web: clone, pull, push, …

  • Resolving conflicts

  • Open licenses

  • Where to host work, and why

• Programming in Python

  • Using libraries

  • Working with arrays

  • Reading and plotting data

  • Creating and using functions

  • Loops and conditionals

  • Defensive programming

  • Using Python from the command line

Instructors: Jonathan Bradley, Chreston Miller, and Nathaniel Porter