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Target audience: Postgraduate researchers at all stages and from all disciplines.

Workshop description: This three-hour academic writing workshop is geared towards any postgraduate researcher who is actively engaged in writing at any stage of their studies. The key aim of the workshop is to discuss and pilot ways of bringing greater creativity and reflexivity into your writing. To do this, we will look at what constitutes a ‘writerly’ voice, the role of the audience and how to bring ourselves more into the writing we produce.

Together we will draw across our experiences from different PGR topics, approaches, stages, and disciplines, to share challenges, strategies, and joys of the academic writing journey. There will be opportunities to explore different ideas, share experiences of academic writing, as well as engage in writing activities. It is our intention that you will leave the workshop with ideas of how to stimulate creativity and a better understanding of your relationship with writing. We hope that this will re-energise you to approach your writing in new ways, whether in terms of process, style or content.

Target audience: 

Postgraduate researchers in the early stages from all disciplines.

Workshop description: 

Theses and dissertations form a valuable body of work that can be really useful for your own research, and there are a range of tools available for finding these resources in your research area.

This session introduces several online tools that can be used to identify and access dissertations and theses from academic institutions within the UK and beyond.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the workshop you will have:

• Learnt how to find Sussex theses
• Discovered how to access UK and international theses using a number of online databases
• Learnt about providing online access to your own postgraduate research theses

Workshop feedback:

• "The workshop was very useful and introduced me to many databases I was not aware of"
• "It opened my eyes on how to get information on available theses within Sussex as well as the rest of the UK and worldwide"
• "I feel a lot more confident about finding theses"

About the facilitators: 

The Library Research Support team support researchers at all levels across the University. They offer bookable one-to-one sessions tailored to suit your specific research needs, run various group training workshops, and organise seminars and events to engage with the research community on campus.

Target Audience: PGRs from all stages.

This workshop will give you an overview of entrepreneurship and the support available to you from the Entrepreneurship team at Sussex. All PGRs welcome!

We’ll explore:

• Pros and cons of starting a business/social enterprise or freelancing
• Approaches to developing your idea
• Key considerations – business planning, protecting your idea, legal structures, funding options
• Case studies
• Support from the Sussex Entrepreneurship Team - workshops, resources, and 1:1 appointments

Workshop description: This two-part course aims to introduce you to carrying out statistical analysis using R. It assumes that you will have no prior familiarity with R, but that you have completed a course in statistics that includes topics such as multiple regression and multivariate analysis of variance.

At the end of the course you should:

• Be able to run analyses in R, including the use of R Studio and Deducer
• Understand objects and functions and be able to write simple functions
• Be able to enter, save and manage data files
• Carry out statistical analysis, including multiple regression, logistic regression, and linear mixed models.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-part workshop and participants are expected to attend both sessions.

Workshop description: This two-part workshop builds on the Introduction to R course. Students should have some familiarity with R, and have attended Introduction to R or equivalent (essentially an introduction to the 'tidyverse').

The first day will be devoted to further exploration of the graphics package ggplot2, including comparing groups, and customising chart appearance using scale functions and themes.

The second day will introduce R Markdown as an alternative way of working with R and producing documents reporting analysis. We shall also look further at data manipulation, including data restructuring and joining datasets.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-part workshop and participants are expected to attend both sessions.

Target audience: Postgraduate researchers at all stages from all disciplines.

Workshop description: This two-part practical workshop is ideal for researchers with no previous experience of using SPSS & covers the basics to get you started. This is a hands-on session focusing on how to use the SPSS program. A basic knowledge of statistical concepts and terms is required and participants are expected to attend both parts of the course.

Working through a number of practical exercises, you will learn some of the key functions of SPSS, from data entry and creating basic output, to plotting figures and running more advanced statistical analyses.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the workshop you will have learnt how to:

• Enter data, plot figures and create some basic output such as descriptive statistics
• Run t-tests, correlations and simple linear regressions
• Run factorial ANOVA's
• Use the split file and filter functions
• Run a multiple regression
• Examine outliers, normality and transform data

Workshop feedback:

• "I am completely new to SPSS and felt that this was spot on as an introduction"
• "It was very interactive, provided enough time for everyone to catch up and understand. Really helped"
• "Excellent course. Really clear and well presented"

PLEASE NOTE: This is a two-part workshop and participants are expected to attend both sessions.

Target audience: 

Postgraduate researchers in the early stages from all disciplines

Workshop description: 

There are a number of quick and effective ways to keep yourself up to date with the research going on in your subject area. This workshop will explore the tools and techniques available.This session includes time to test out some of these tools and techniques yourself – please bring a computer with you if you’d like to do so.

Learning outcomes: By the end of the workshop you will have

• Learnt how to set up database alerts to discover newly published articles and track relevant citations and authors
• Discovered services for keeping up to date with new issues of journals.
• Found out about using key resources and social media to discover who is researching in a similar field to you

Workshop feedback:

• "Very useful to know how many ways you can keep up to date! I had no idea you could receive alerts from so many resources"
• "Everything was explained very clearly and the presenters had a great deal of knowledge even if very subject-specific questions were asked"
• "This workshop was very helpful, and I liked that the topic was covered concisely."

About the facilitators: 

The Library Research Support team support researchers at all levels across the University. They offer bookable one-to-one sessions tailored to suit your specific research needs, run various group training workshops, and organise seminars and events to engage with the research community on and off campus.

This session will introduce you to tools for capturing web content and the underlying archival principles that drive such work. We will look at three tools – ArchiveWeb, Conifer and Wget - which let you create interactive copies of an existing website and download web assets. This session may be of interest to people whose research involves analysis of web content that changes over time or who have their own website they wish to preserve beyond the life of a project.

Each tool will be introduced through practical demonstrations with time for participants to trial them in a workshop setting if they wish. Participants should bring their own device. Pre-installation of the tools prior to the session is highly recommended if you would like to trial them.

All the tools are free to use and can be found via the following links:

By the end of this workshop you will have:

• Learnt about the basic principles of web archiving
• Learnt about ArchiveWeb, Conifer and Wget as tools for capturing web content

Target audience

Postgraduate researchers at any stage and from all disciplines.

About the facilitator

This workshop is facilitated by Helen Webb, Research Data Management Librarian and Duncan Harrison, Research Data and Digital Preservation Officer from the Library Research Support Team.

About this theme

Learn workshops get you thinking about the knowledge and intellectual abilities you need to conduct your research. Visit our Learn workshops page for more sessions.