Author name: Leah Breevoort

Research Ethics: It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt

November 2020

We’ve all heard the old adage “it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.” Although most people direct this phrase at children, it can just as well be applied to conducting research. It’s all ethical—until the risks outweigh the potential benefits. It’s all fair—until your participant compensation becomes coercion. It might seem like common […]

42: The answer to every bad evaluation question

September 2020

In the novel Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a group of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings build a supercomputer to ask the “ultimate question…the answer to life, the universe, and everything.” After waiting millions of years, the supercomputer tells them the answer to life, the universe, and everything is…42! Some might disagree, but the lesson here is […]

What’s your goal here?

August 2020

Every day we assess the world around us. We ask ourselves whether that decision we made was a good idea, what makes that person trustworthy, why we should or should not change something. We form a question in our head, collect data, analyze the information, and come to a conclusion. In short, we are all […]

Between a Graph and a Hard Place Chapter Two: Do it yourself

July 2020

Research can be a scary word that comes with a lot of fear about our own skills. We think of experts conducting field work, gathering data, and writing long, technical reports. Like reading a foreign language, it’s easy to feel ill-equipped for deciphering what it all means. Chapter one of Between a Graph and a […]

Visualizing Data: choosing the right chart

July 2020

If you walk into a hardware store, you might see an entire aisle of screws—short ones, long ones, phillips head, flat head, ones with weird little anchors on the ends. They might all be screws, but they each serve a specific purpose—for wood or cement, for different screwdrivers, for thick or thin materials. It’s the […]

Let us know what you think!

July 2020

When the COVID-19 pandemic began a couple of months ago, we at LRS began thinking about how we could help. What skills could we share that might be useful to library staff and our communities?  So many different sources were releasing charts and graphs to help us all understand what was happening, and we were […]

Visualizing Data: the logarithmic scale

June 2020

Welcome to part 2 on data visualizations. If you’re just joining us, we talked last week about how the y-axis can be altered to mislead a reader about the data. You can find that post here. Now, let’s jump right back into another big data visualization misunderstanding.  The goal of data visualizations is to allow […]

Visualizing Data: a misleading y-axis

June 2020

With great power comes great responsibility—that’s how I feel about data visualizations. Good ones help readers quickly understand the data and can convey an important message to a lot of people. However, bad data visualizations can intentionally or unintentionally mislead, causing us to come to the wrong conclusions. In this multi-part post, we’ll unpack some […]

Correlation doesn’t equal causation (but it does equal a lot of other things)

May 2020

Correlation ≠ causation Data are pieces of information, like the number of books checked out at the library or reference questions asked. Those pieces of information are simply points on a chart or numbers in a spreadsheet until someone interprets their meaning. People create charts and graphs so that we can visualize that meaning more […]

Magnifying glass on open books
May 2020

It’s hard to know who you can trust out there. “Fake news” is now a prevalent concept in society and the internet makes it possible for anyone to publish—well, anything. As library professionals, you’ve probably already acquired a great deal of experience determining the credibility of sources. Many of the same skills are needed to […]