Computation and Visualization Consortium
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The Computation and Visualization Consortium will take place June 12-16, 2017 at Macalester College (St. Paul, MN).
Application Deadline: We will begin reviewing applications and selecting participants on March 31, 2017. Complete the application form in advance of this date for full consideration.
NOTE: A set of seats and travel scholarships are available for Faculty from non-CVC institutions.
Macalester faculty and their counterparts at Calvin College, Gustavus Adolphus College, Grinnell College, Lawrence University, and Smith College comprise the consortium.
The consortium addresses the shared need to improve key computational skills, to promote connections among faculty with similar teaching and research interests, and to conceive, vet, and implement curricular materials (syllabi, instructional modules, assignments, and labs) that cultivate in students the skills to organize, filter, analyze, and display data sets of increasing size and complexity.
Workshop Audience and Topics
This gathering aims to engage science faculty who have an interest to better prepare science students to meet the challenges of formatting, analyzing, and visualizing increasingly complex and large data sets.
Based on outcomes from the first three CVC workshops, the most successful participants have either arrived with a specific topic of interest or have attended as part of a team of 2 or more faculty from the same institution, often with one of the members being someone with experience with statistics. Preference will be given to applicants that fall into either of these groupings.
The first 2-1/2 days of the workshop starts at 9:00 AM on Monday, June 12. This portion of the workshop aims to introduce faculty members to the open source software package, RStudio. These days will serve as an introduction to using R for handling data and graphics and include
- an introduction to using R for handling data and graphics
- deconstructing graphs to the underlying data
- constructing graphics from data
- data wrangling: operations to get data in the right form for graphics
The second 2 -1/2 days (starting at noon on June 14 and ending at 4:00 PM on June 16) will provide:
- quick review of the first half of workshop
- one-on-one or small group (by discipline) development of case studies.
- summarizing data with models
- data cleaning
- data web-scraping basics
- programming in R (as needed)
Participants are welcome to attend either or both of the halves of the workshop. Those who plan to attend only the second half will benefit most if they already have some experience with formatting, analyzing, and visualizing data.
The workshop will be led by Nick Horton (Professor of Statistics, Amherst College), Danny Kaplan (DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, Macalester College), and Randy Pruim (Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, Calvin College).
For questions about workshop content, please contact Danny Kaplan.
Lodging and Food:
The Computation and Visualization Consortium, funded through science education grant awards to Macalester College, Calvin College, Grinnell College, and Smith College, covers all local workshop expenses. All hotel arrangements will be made for participants.
Arrival and Departure
The workshop will begin at 9:00 AM on Monday, June 12, 2017 and ends at 4:00 PM on June 16, 2017. Those flying to the workshop can book flights to the Minneapolis/St. Paul (MSP) International airport. The airport is approximately 20 minutes from campus by car. Shuttle or taxi transportation will be arranged once the participant flight schedules are known. As agreed during the planning of the CVC, each participating institution will cover its faculty members’ transportation costs. For non-CVC members, a limited number of travel scholarships may be available.
You can visit this website to see the schedule and resources developed for previous CVC workshops.