Genomics Workshop Pilot and BugBBQ at University of Arizona

This post originally appeared on the Data Carpentry website

This February, a small group of committed community members, led by Taylor Reiter at the University of California, Davis, completed a major update to the Data Carpentry Genomics curriculum. A huge thank you to everyone who contributed! This update included significant changes to both the data set and the software used for the lessons, modernizing the workshop and keeping it relevant to researchers working in the genomics field. The new version of this curriculum is already live and will be officially published in the upcoming lesson release in June.

In parallel with these updates to the core Genomics workshop curriculum, Maintainers of the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Genomics lesson have completely revamped their lesson. While previous versions focused on analysis of a small metadata dataset and was disconnected from the narrative of the remaining Genomics lessons, this revised version picks up where the core lessons leave off in analyzing and visualizing output from a variant calling pipeline.

Jason Williams and Uwe Hilgert will be hosting a pilot workshop using this new lesson at the University of Arizona on 30-31 May, followed by a BugBBQ hacky day in which Instructors and other Carpentries community members around the globe will use feedback from the pilot to improve the Genomics lessons and prepare them for publication in June.

How can I get involved?

1. If you’re interested in attending the workshop and hacky day, please fill out this application. Limited funding is available to support travel within the United States.
2. If you can’t be present in person, the workshop and hacky day will be live-streamed from 8:30am - 5:00pm US MST. To convert to your local time, click this link for start time and this link for end time . Start and end times are the same each day. For live-stream links, please visit the workshop website.
3. Opportunities to contribute aren’t limited to just these three days! Maintainers for the Genomics lessons welcome contributions and have created lists of issues that need attention. Check out the links below for each lesson to see how you can contribute.
   • Project Organization and Management
   • Introduction to the Command Line
   • Data Wrangling and Processing
   • Introduction to Cloud Computing
   • Data Analysis and Visualization
4. We’re planning to start actively promoting the Genomics curriculum in June and will have more opportunities for you to teach. Make sure you’re signed up on the Instructor mailing list to be informed of upcoming teaching opportunities. We’re also developing training materials to help Instructors prepare for this workshop. To be notified when materials are released, add your info to this form.
5. No matter how you choose to get involved, you can follow the conversation during the BugBBQ on this Gitter Channel.

If you have any questions about how to get involved or about the Genomics curriculum, email us at team@carpentries.org. We’re excited to work with you on publishing these lessons and making them available to a larger audience!