Infographics are a specific type of data visualization that uses a mix of data, visuals, and text to inform or persuade. They are common in marketing and social media, but are becoming more popular as a way to attract and engage with audiences to share your message. They can be used to promote yourself and your activities and discoveries; from marketing a new business product or service, to sharing research results with the public or stakeholders. 

Through a combination of lecture and activities, this three-hour workshop will introduce participants to best practices and guidelines for designing effective infographics and evaluating them. For the final part of the workshop, participants will get a chance to go through the entire design process of an infographic, from determining the story, sketching the layout, choosing appropriate data visualizations, selecting fonts and colours, and finally using a common online infographic creation tool called Piktochart, to implement the design and create a finished infographic. 

For more information on Data Visualization, including topics covered in the workshop, and services offered by the libraries, see our Data Visualization Guide.

Location: Robarts Library, 5th Floor. Map & Data Library Computer Lab. 

Research and Writing Seminars: Develop Your Scholarly Voice. Each session in this suite of four interactive seminars integrates the learning of academic research and writing skills and is taught by a librarian in collaboration with a writing instructor. The goal of each seminar is to help you develop your own voice as an emerging scholar by enabling you to identify, situate and substantiate your arguments in the context of the scholarly discussion taking place in your discipline. The seminars are designed for humanities and social sciences undergraduate students. Graduate students might wish to consider the research-related skills offerings in the Graduate Professional Skills Program.

Take any three (3) of the four (4) seminars to earn credit on your Co-Curricular Record.

Annotated Bibliographies

The session addresses the “big picture” of the place of annotated bibliographies in the scholarly conversation, as well as “nuts-and-bolts” strategies for researching and evaluating books and articles to identify the best sources on a topic. Through short lectures, interactive class discussion and hands-on exercises, you will learn:

To recognize different types of annotated bibliography assignments How annotated bibliographies fit within the broader framework of documentation and how various schools of documentation treat annotated bibliographies differently To define the scope of your research to make good choices about including and excluding sources To identify landmark or influential studies on your topic

Key terms for this session: Bloom’s Taxonomy, search strategy, background research, scholarly sources, popular sources, description & evaluation

Location: E.J. Pratt Library, E-Classroom (room 306) Directions

Other seminars in this series include:

Critical Reading Writing to Cite Literature Reviews