Information in Action

How can we keep up with the rapid pace of information creation? Navigating the online information environment can be intimidating, even more so during a time of pandemic. In this session, we will discuss the skills you need to help you keep on top of emerging knowledge and identify information gaps. You will learn about unnecessary research duplication and how to avoid it, effectively framing a research question, searching for academic literature, and identifying research that has not yet been published. 

Learning Objectives

• Understand what unnecessary research duplication is and how to avoid it
• Identify different types of research questions
• Build a searchable research question 
• Identify and organize key search concepts
• Identify appropriate sources of published and unpublished research evidence

Sharing articles and data benefits creators, the research community, and beyond by making sure that work has the largest possible impact and is neither ignored nor unnecessarily duplicated. The need for quick dissemination and scientific progress has been particularly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. This session will touch on the positive implications of sharing research and address some myths and misconceptions. Preprints, published articles and research data can be shared safely and ethically in the ongoing combat against the pandemic. 

Learning Objectives

• Understand what a preprint is and where to find or deposit them
• Differentiate between open access and predatory publishing
• Recognize the positive implications of OA for authors
• Identify how data can be shared ethically 
• Understand how researchers can protect their right over shared outputs
• Recognize the positive implications of sharing research for researchers

Part 1: Statistics Canada is producing innovative, responsive data products to help us better understand the pandemic and its impact. Starting with a look at Stat Canada’s COVID-19: A Data Perspective, Louise will discuss the role of crowdsourcing and administrative data in data collection, and consider, among other things, the effect of COVID on our mental health, our working lives, and our mortality.

Part 2: The Nova Scotia government has been releasing COVID data on a daily basis, but does not provide a way for looking at past data in an interactive way. Jen has generated a data dashboard, which displays our Nova Scotia COVID data using six different visualizations (counts by health region, by gender, by age, and three variations of positive test results) plus two data counts (hospitalizations and deaths). Jen will describe how she combined data obtained from Nova Scotia Health, Nova Scotia Open Data, and Statistics Canada. It is updated on a daily basis and available online.

Learning Objectives

• Understand the innovation used to generate real time data
• Identify the sources used to create aggregate data and visualizations
• Learn how a data dashboard is created