Elizabeth Quigley
The Dataverse team has been hard at work on an extensive rewrite of the Dataverse application. Thanks to helpful feedback received from user testing, almost every part of the workflow and interface is being tweaked and revised. So, as a preview of what’s to come, we have set up a Beta* for Dataverse users to give it a try.
You can start trying out some of the new features at dataverse-demo.iq.harvard.edu. Feel free to post any questions, comments and issues in our Dataverse User Community Group and use the tag “Beta” to help us organize them. Please note, however, that this Beta version does not have the complete features and functionality that will be made available in our official version 4.0 release expected for Summer 2014.
You can check out our series of blog posts about Dataverse 4.0 to read more about what to expect in Beta and Dataverse 4.0:
User experience and workflow upgrade based on extended usability studies
Metadata standards for: social sciences, biomedical, astronomy
New File Upload and Handling (with metadata extraction for: R data, Stata, SPSS, Excel, CSV, FITS)
So, those of you ready to try out the future of Dataverse, check out dataverse-demo.iq.harvard.edu and send us your feedback via the Dataverse User Community Group. Do what you like with the data** in this Beta instance, since this will not affect any of our actual datasets. And as always, our code is available for you to check out on GitHub. Enjoy Beta! We look forward to hearing what you think and we’ll keep you updated as we continue to work on 4.0.
* Beta is only a testing environment so any data stored on Beta is temporary and will eventually be removed. To upload real data and receive a formal data citation, please use thedata.harvard.edu
** Only datasets that have no restrictions and are non-identifiable data can be uploaded to Beta.