Getting started with a new tool that you’ve never used before can be a challenging experience. Fortunately there are resources available to you to help you up the learning curve. Check out the training courses, guides and tutorials below to see if there is a resource that will help smooth your learning experience, or that can teach you new tricks in tools that you have previously used.
Drop in to a Hacky Hour session if you need to get some expert advice on problems related to coding, data analytics, digital tools, or data visualisation. Run by the Sydney Informatics Hub, these sessions are a great way to get some help when you're stuck, and also to meet other researchers working with similar tools and data.
If you're an academic, researcher or higher degree by research (HDR) student, the Sydney Informatics Hub offers support for data science, statistical consulting, bioinformatics, modelling, simulation, visualisation and research data management.
Sydney Informatics Hub and Intersect Training Courses – The University's Sydney Informatics Hub works with the eResearch support agency Intersect to offer training courses that are available for free to researchers and PhD students. These include courses on statistics, data science, bioinformatics, programming with Python, R and Julia, using Excel, using Regular Expressions, and High Performance Computing, among others.
LinkedIn Learning – An online learning platform with lots of video tutorials and courses. This is a good place to look if you need to learn a new tool. University staff and students can sign in using their UniKey and password.
ESRI E-Learning – Over 50 virtual training courses on ArcGIS are freely available to University students and staff.
SAS Training – As part of the latest SAS software license for the Education Analytical Suite of products, there is complimentary access to 10 SAS eLearning courses.
NVivo Training – As part of the University's licence for NVivo, staff and students have access to online, self-paced training.
The Programming Historian – Offers novice-friendly, peer-reviewed tutorials that help humanists learn a wide range of digital tools, techniques, and workflows to facilitate their research. Tutorials include lessons on Python, web scraping, QGIS, Google Earth, Omeka, MALLET and other distant reading tools, R, Regular Expressions, OpenRefine, Zotero, data management, and data manipulation. Although the tutorials were developed for and by those working in humanities, they are useful for anyone looking to get started with these tools.
SPSS Tutorials – Kent State University Library has put together easy to follow step-by-step introductory tutorials for the statistical software SPSS.
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