UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Starting Feb. 12, the Research Informatics and Publishing department at Penn State University Libraries and the Office of the Associate CIO for Research will offer virtual information sessions on data analytics and visualization. Sessions will highlight tools for business analytics (Power BI, Tableau) and big data analytics with cloud platforms (Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform/GCP, and AWS).
These sessions are aimed at introducing the resources and expertise in these areas that are available through the Libraries and Penn State Cloud Services. Participants will explore available software tools and cloud platforms for data analysis and visualization, with demos to show how each tool works. A drop-in office hour will be offered after each workshop for those who are interested in discussing the data analytics tools for their projects.
Sessions are free and open to all Penn State faculty, staff and students. Advance registration is recommended; registration links are provided below for each session.
Research Informatics and Publishing also provides guest lectures and one-on-one consultation for using these tools in class or for research projects. Appointments can be made at https://psu.libcal.com/appointments/DigitalLab. In addition, the Advanced Analytics and Visualization Digital Lab, accessible remotely via weblabs.psu.edu, provides software tools including Power BI, MATLAB, STATA, SPSS, SAS and ArcGIS. For more information about the University Libraries' resources for data visualization, visit the Research Data Services web page. For cloud services available to the Penn State community, visit https://cloud.psu.edu.
Data Analytics and Visualization Sessions
- Introduction to Data Analytics and Visualization with Tableau and Power BI — Friday, Feb. 12, 2–3:30 p.m.
- Power BI Deep Dive: Modeling Data with DAX and Power Query M Language — Friday, Feb. 26, 2–3:30 p.m.
- Introduction to Big Data Analytics with MS Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — Friday, March 5, 2–3:30 p.m.
- Big Data Analytics with AWS — Friday, March 19, 10-11:30 a.m.
The introductory sessions are designed to provide an overview of each data analytics tool and explore their commonly used features for data analysis and visualization. Demos based on a sample data set will be provided. The Deep Dive session is designed to introduce advanced data manipulation features in Power BI (Windows only) such as data analysis expressions and power query language.
For additional information, contact Xuying Cindy Xin, certified Tableau desktop specialist and Power BI trainer, at xzx1@psu.edu.