Services & Research
Our Services & Featured Projects
Our Services
Our core services are designed to support the entire research lifecycle:
How We Collaborate
We offer support in a variety of formats to meet your research and teaching needs, and we are happy to meet either in-person or virtually:
Individual Research Consultations: One-on-one support for your specific data or digital scholarship questions.
Customized Classroom Instruction: We can partner with faculty to provide instruction on data literacy, tools, and methods tailored to your course.
Group Workshops: We can design and lead workshops for research groups, labs, or departments on specific topics or tools.
Recommended Tools
While we support a wide range of software, here are the primary tools we use to support our core services:
Research Data Management: DMPTool, BEARdata/Texas Data Repository
Survey Design: Qualtrics, Microsoft Forms
Data Analysis: SPSS, Stata, Excel, Power BI, NVivo
Text Data Mining: Gale Digital Scholar Lab, Voyant Tools, Python (spaCy, NLTK)
Geospatial Analysis: QGIS, ArcGIS
AI Research Support: Python, Ollama, Jan.ai, Hugging Face
Data Visualization: Tableau Public, Power BI
Featured Research Projects
Collaborators: Alejandro Castrillon, Honors College-Baylor Interdisciplinary Core
Description: To explore the concept of social liberty in the writings of Simon Bolivar, this project used a generative AI model to analyze nearly 12,000 historical documents. The DDS team is helping develop a public-facing Power BI dashboard, allowing researchers everywhere to interact with and query the extracted data.
Tools utilized: Jan.ai, Ollama, Power Query, Power BI, Python
Public Resources: GitHub repository: bolivar
Collaborators: Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty
Description: In partnership with the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, our team helped create a series of public data dashboards to make complex data on hunger and food insecurity accessible across Texas. These interactive Power BI reports visualize child nutrition and food insecurity data at the county and school district levels, empowering communities and policymakers to make informed, data-driven decisions to end hunger.
Tools utilized: Power Query, Power BI, Python
Public Resources: Hunger Data Lab: Data Dashboards
Collaborators: iEngage Research Team, School of Education-Curriculum & Instruction
Tools utilized: Qualtrics, Excel, SPSS
Description: iEngage is a summer camp that equips middle school students with essential civics knowledge and competencies, fostering active engagement in political and community life. In collaboration with the iEngage team, we helped design surveys to collect data during the camp from students, parents, and camp counselors, as well as assist with cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing the data using Excel and SPSS.
Tools utilized: Qualtrics, Excel, SPSS
Public Resources: iEngage Summer Civics Institute
Collaborators: Kristina Benham, Department of History; Laura Semrau, Humanities Librarian.
Tools utilized: Qualtrics, PowerBI
Description: This collaboration involved re-designing a course project for HIST 1300 wherein the students would choose a historical event (within a specific timeframe or topic area) to write a report on. The project re-design involved collaborating with the instructor and liaison librarian to create a survey form for students to enter information related to their topic, as well as creating an interactive PowerBI dashboard to visualize their final projects. The dashboard allowed multiple sections of this course to be visualized altogether for the instructor and students to see/learn about other historical topics covered by other students.
Tools utilized: Qualtrics, Power Query, Power BI
Public Resources: HIST 1300 Semester Project Dashboard