Welcome to Manchester's Carpentry Community!

At the University of Manchester there are various groups offering training in research computing (including Carpentry workshops) to researchers and PhD students, including:

• Research IT
• Cathie Marsh Institute for Social Research (CMI)
• The University of Manchester Library
• Manchester branch of the Software Sustainability Institute based at the eScienceLab group in the Department of Computer Science

Contact Research IT for Carpentry workshops in general, or for training for Doctoral Training Centres. For Data Carpentry for social sciences the best point of contact is CMI, while Research IT will be able to guide you and provide information about general Data Carpentry workshops or Data Carpentry for your domain. Manchester branch of the Software Sustainability Institute offers training coordination and Carpentry community support and consultancy. See our contact page for details on how to get in touch with each of these individual groups and training providers.

Get in touch

• Check out our contact page including local Manchester community mailing list
• #local-uk-manchester Slack channel under Carpentries Slack
• Local Manchester Carpentries community mailing list
• UK Carpentry Community space

Carpentry Workshops @ Manchester

• Data Carpentry for Social Sciences using R, 14-17 September 2021
• Software Carpentry workshop, 13-16 July 2021
• Library Carpentry workshop, 8-11 June 2021
• Summer of Carpentries @ Manchester
• Love Data Week workshop, 18 February 2021
• Library Carpentry workshop for CILIP MDG, November 2020
• Library Carpentry workshop, 11 December 2019
• Library Carpentry workshop, 30 November 2018
• Data Carpentry for Social Sciences using R, 13-14 December 2018
• Data Carpentry for Social Sciences using Python, 4-5 October 2018
• Data Carpentry for Social Sciences using R, 19-20 July 2018
• Software Carpentry workshop, 3-4 July 2018
• Software Carpentry workshop, 15-16 May 2018

What are The Carpentries?

The Carpentries teach foundational computational, coding, and data science skills to researchers worldwide with no or minimal prior programming knowledge who find themselves increasingly having to write code to conduct their work. In the UK, the Carpentry programme was first endorsed by the Software Sustanability Institute (SSI), which still provide support for running and organising workshops and recruiting instructors from the wider UK Carpentry community.

The Carpentries project was formed in January 2018 by formally merging Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry. There are now many more new and emerging Carpentries, such as Library Carpentry and HPC Carpentry, which are all coming together under the umbrella of The Carpentries. These are all communities of practice - consisting of volunteer instructors, trainers, maintainers, helpers, and supporters who all share a mission to teach scientists best practices in writing clean, reproducible and robust code.

Software Carpentry (since early 2000s) focuses on conveying the best practices in programming and writing clean, reproducible and robust code to analyse data regardless of the tools used. In general, topics that are covered by the core Software Carpentry curriculum include:

• Automating repetitive tasks - using UNIX Shell
• Code version control, sharing and collaboration - using git/GitHub or Mercurial
• An introduction to programming and best practices - using R or Python

Data Carpentry (since 2014) teaches particular and recommended open source tools to do reproducible and scalable data analysis. In general, topics that are covered by the core Data Carpentry curriculum include:

• Best practices in data organization using spreadsheets
• Data cleaning - using OpenRefine
• Data management with SQL
• Data analysis and visualisation - using R or Python

History

Read more about the history of Software and Data Carpentry.