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Data Science Centre Data Science Centre

Research Software Engineering Support

Researchers from the UvA and AUAS increasingly need support with questions and issues related to research software. In 2023, the University Library launched a pilot call for research software projects, linking DSC researchers with a skilled and experienced research software engineer at the Library.

Projects awarded under the 2023 call 

1. The CorpusCompass project

Research team: Jelke Bloem (Assistant Professor, Faculty of Humanities & ILLC, UvA); Nicolo’ Brandizzi (PhD Candidate, University of Sapienza); Muhadj Adnan (PhD Candidate, University of Bayreuth)

The researchers requested help with further development of their open-source tool CorpusCompass. This tool aims to allow linguists to analyze, annotate, and validate their texts. The researchers started the project with a Jupyter Notebook-based prototype.

Software engineering support provided:

  • Improved and restructured code
  • Created a new user interface
  • Improved overall user-friendliness of tool

2. The Triple R project

Research team: Tessa Blanken (Assistant Professor), Riet van Bork (Assistant Professor), Jill de Ron (PhD Candidate). All from Psychological Methods Department, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, UvA. 

The researchers focused on a theoretical model for a certain type of treatment for insomnia. The model proposes an explanation of the mechanisms behind the effectiveness of this treatment. The researchers aimed to translate this theoretical model to a computational model in order to study it further. As a future end-goal, they wanted to create an application for professionals providing treatment for insomnia patients. The researchers already had a prototype script for the model in R.

Software engineering support provided:

  • Developed R Shiny app to visualize model and its parameters, showing the effects of manipulating the parameters on insomnia over time

3. The TRACE project

Research team: Carolyn Birdsall (Associate Professor, Faculty of Humanities, UvA)

The researcher worked on metadata from radio recordings made during World War II. These recordings were often moved during the War, so the metadata described where and when respective recordings were located.

Software engineering support provided: 

  • Created Linked Open Datasets based on the original metadata
  • Created a site in Omeka S to showcase a map and included several different search functions to search through the data

Testimonials from participating researchers

Dr. Tessa Blanken, Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences
With the Research Software Engineering support offered by the library we created an interface around our computational model. The discussions with the software engineer were really helpful to determine the desired outcomes, which were then implemented in a sprint-format, allowing to go back-and-forth several times. Ultimately, creating such an interface brings our research closer to next-end users, made possible with support from the library!

Research Software Engineering Call 2024

A new call will be announced later this year. Please check back for more information. 

Questions

If you have any questions about the call, please contact us at dsc@uva.nl.