DEI Scholars Bioinformatics Week by Savage Cree Hess
This is a guest post by 2021 DEI Biocollections Summer Scholars Program alum, Savage Cree Hess.
Behind most modern science, there's at least a touch of coding.
For bioinformatics week, we the DEI Scholars plunged into the fundamentals of programming, poked around with databases, and crafted a personal bio.
Our refresher on coding dissected the basics of HTML, CSS, Java, and JSON. We played around on some of the coding sites (such as CodeSandbox and CodePen) and were introduced to several instructional websites (such as KhanAcadamy, Code.org, and CodeAcadamy).
For our delve into databases, we took a tour through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and associated ASU Biocollections data on Symbiota data portals (SEINet, Ecdysis, and CSVColl). Inside, we encountered millions of digitized specimens across the eukaryotic spectrum. From there, we downloaded all of the digitized specimens we’ve contributed from our field surveys.
We then settled our sights on our DEI Scholar pages. We tore out the placeholders and filled it up with our own bios. We then uploaded our database entries. Finally, we polished it off with some slight tweaks to the site.
All in all, we learned some fundamentally awesome skills this week.
Stay tuned for future posts by our program alumni outlining some of the highlights of this year’s ASU Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Biocollections Summer Scholars Program.