Bits and Bytes

Image credit: Baim Hanif on Unsplash

We want to send a special shout out to all of our graduating Data Services Student Specialists. Congratulations to you all and a heartfelt thank you for all of your hard work and dedication to Data Services and our patrons!

Image Credit: Kelsy Gagnebin on Unsplash

Don't forget to keep a copy of your hard work! While you do get access to some library resources as an alum, once you graduate your access to Data Services tools like ArcGIS, Qualtrics, and RedCap ends. If you have projects in any of these platforms, make sure you transfer your account or export your data before graduating. Find information on transferring ownership of content, export tools, and whom to contact if you have questions in our:

Join the NYU community on Tuesday, June 2, from 10am-4pm ET at the Kimmel Center for Tech Fest 2026: Building CommunITy - a dynamic day of innovation, collaboration, and connection across higher education technology. Highlights include a keynote from Bharat N. Anand (NYU Stern Dean), a special session with Suzy Welch (NYU Stern professor and bestselling author), and a CIO panel featuring technology leaders from universities across the region. The day will also feature sessions on AI, cybersecurity, and leadership development, along with networking opportunities, roundtables, giveaways, and interactive experiences. To learn more and RSVP, please visit the NYU Tech Fest 2026 website.

Join NYU’s three-day Foundations of Research Computing (FORC) Camp this August 25–27 for hands-on, immersive workshops in data storytelling (including mapping, text analysis, data visualization, web publication, and digital exhibits), Generative AI, Python, R, and applied AI workflows. Whether you’re new to coding or ready to build RAG pipelines and LLM-powered research tools, FORC offers practical, interdisciplinary training designed to strengthen your research skills and connect you with a vibrant community of graduate researchers. Explore full track descriptions, program details, and registration information on the FORC Camp website.

UltraViolet is part of a suite of repositories at NYU that provide a home for research materials. Data Services helps NYU researchers prepare their materials for deposit in UltraViolet to facilitate open access and long-term preservation.

One useful feature of UltraViolet is the ability to version records. This means that if you update your data or code, you can release a new version that receives its own DOI while remaining connected to previous versions. Once a record has more than one version, a parent DOI is also created, so you can always have a link to the most recent version. A couple of our datasets with new versions include:

Image Credit: ICPSR

Researchers at NYU's Silver School of Social Work deposited their data with ICPSR's National Addiction and Health Data Archive Program (NAHDAP). Their study, Peer-Driven Intervention to Seek, Test, and Treat Heterosexuals at High Risk for HIV, New York City, 2011-2016 (ICPSR 39781) is part of the Seek, Test, Treat and Retain (STTR) Collaboration Project that involved over twenty studies in the fields of HIV and drug abuse. You can find the documentation and review the access requirements here. Congratulations to Marya Gwadz (Principal Investigator) and the team!

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Ever wonder what Vogue Magazine covered back in the day? You can explore their pages computationally using our ProQuest Vogue Magazine Text-as-Data collection. This dataset allows researchers to work locally and includes approximately 451,000 XML files with accompanying JPEGs capturing the full text, page image, and a number of metadata fields for Vogue Magazine covering the years 1892 to 2016. Read more about how to access this collection on our Text Data Mining Research Guide. This data is available to members of the NYU community only and it, along with more recent issues of Vogue, can also be explored using embedded tools and GPTs via ProQuest TDM Studio.

Please note: researchers cannot use this data with any products or platforms (including large language models) that may retain or make use of the data.

Image Credit: Data Services

Q. What's your name, program, and year?
A. Shaopeng Cheng. I'm 2nd year in MS of biostatistics at Global Public Health Department.

Q. What's your service area at Data Services and how long have you worked here?
A. I worked as a quantitative student specialist in Data Services, starting last May, so I worked here for 1 year.

Q. What do you like most about working at Data Services?
A. I really enjoy the circumstance of working here, surrounding with a good community of faculties and other student workers. Despite coming from different majors, we can share our own experiences and knowledge to each other when we have troubles while we are meeting with patrons. Full-time faculty also supported us in different areas with their full strength.

Q. Describe your favorite data-related project that you've worked on.
A. Last summer, I worked on a data cleaning mini-project where I was given a form dataset and asked to standardize the majors and departments students came from. The challenge was that the data was extremely messy, containing inconsistent abbreviations (like "CS" vs. "Comp Sci"), typos, and freeform text entries, which made it impossible to directly group records into unified categories. To solve this, I first scraped the official list of major names from the university's website to establish a ground-truth reference. Then, I applied fuzzy matching to map each raw, noisy entry to its closest official major name, which effectively handled typos and abbreviations in one step. This project taught me how much real-world data differs from clean textbook datasets, and it deepened my understanding of practical data preprocessing techniques like web scraping and fuzzy string matching.

Q. What's your favorite place to get a meal or a snack near Bobst Library?
A. I always went to the udon near the Stern school.

Thanks for reading! We hope you have a great summer and to see you soon either on the 5th floor at Bobst or online.

- Your friends at Data Services