KPL joins Share Wisconsin

Jane Speaks is pleased to announce our partnership with Kaukauna Public Library (KPL)! Jane’s team will be working to make KPL’s extensive obituaries collection more accessible through Jane’s Share Wisconsin program. Dating back to 1880, this collection of more than 16,000 individual newspaper clippings from the Kaukauna Times and Kaukauna Sun offers a glimpse into the lives of past Kaukauna residents and their families.

Volunteer today to work on this unique collection! As a Share Wisconsin program participant, you will learn best practices in digital resource management and build technology skills, all while working remotely and at your own pace.  For more information about Share Wisconsin, contact us a jane@janespeaks.org.

Jane Launches ‘Share Wisconsin’

Jane’s Share Wisconsin program offers women in our communities the opportunity to gain professional experience while contributing to a local nonprofit, such as a library, archive, or museum. Program participants are exposed to nonprofit work, learn best practices in data management, and build technology skills, all while working remotely and at their own pace. Partnering institutions receive help in making their local history collections, whether born-digital or digitized, more discoverable online. 

‘Share Wisconsin’ volunteers may like to use the program as a stepping stone into a new career path. As such, volunteers also receive assistance in resume and cover letter writing, searching current job openings, and preparing applications. No prior experience is required, and training is provided.

To learn more about Share Wisconsin, drop us a line at jane@janespeaks.org

Our New Website

Welcome to our new website! The new site better reflects Jane’s project-based approach and allows us to highlight our current project while still providing access to the old. The Clery Crime Data Project is now available under our Past Projects section, where you will find a project summary, data sets, and links to external resources.

So Many Thanks

We would like to thank everyone who has shown interest in Jane’s first project, the Clery Crime Data Project. We are particularly thankful to the Pollination Project for granting us our initial seed funding, to those of you who attended our campus presentations, and to those who reached out with questions and comments. I’d like to add a final shout out to the UW-Madison Police Department for graciously accommodating our many data requests in such a prompt manner. 


As our initial project winds to an end, JaneSpeaks staff will be stepping back for a short hiatus, as we re-group and consider our next steps. We look forward to a strong start upon our return.  As always though, you can contact us at jane@janespeaks.org. Don’t hesitate to reach out!

Investigative Report on Campus Sexual Assault at UW-Madison

Madison Magazine, in collaboration with the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, recently published an article titled Facing the truth behind the statistics of sexual assault: What’s changing as a result of increased reporting. Authored by writer Maggie Ginsberg, this article sheds light on the issue of campus sexual assault at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and how reporting has changed in recent years. Ginsberg explores why so few complaints are investigated; questions what role campus culture plays; and discusses how the University, student-led efforts, support services, authorities, and bystanders can and do prevent campus sexual assault and support survivors.

Despite these efforts, sexual assault remains a problem on UW’s campus with “one in four women and one in 18 men say[ing] they were sexually assaulted during their time as undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison” (AAU, 2015). A worthwhile read, Ginsberg’s article takes a closer looks at what is happening on our campus and offers a thorough reporting that can contribute to ongoing campus discussions.

Read the full article at https://www.channel3000.com/madison-magazine/city-life/facing-the-truth-behind-the-statistics-of-sexual-assault/797352103

2017-18 Data Release

Jane is pleased to announce our latest data release. The University of Wisconsin’s (UW-Madison) crime log data is freely available on the campus police department’s (UWPD) website, though the site only displays the past 60-days worth of data at any given time. Requests for older logs–provided in the form of PDFs–are promptly filled by the department. To make this data more easily accessible to researchers and others interested in using the data, we’ve made the crime logs available in the form of .xlsx, .ods, .csv and .html files. The following summarizes how the campus crime log data for September 1, 2017-August 31, 2018 (available on the resources page) has been sorted and cleaned.

“Daily campus crime log” files:

  • Some words are cut off in the original PDFs and are thus cut off in the new file formats
  • Typos and other inconsistencies have not been corrected
  • Duplicate entries exist, as each PDF represents a 60-day snapshot of the log
  • An additional column, date_extracted, has been added to the new formats; date_extracted denotes the date of the original PDF on which the entry appears

Additionally, our data import via Tabula resulted in a few erroneous entries for Report #. These errors were corrected manually and include:

Report # Appeared As Time Reported Edited To
108P0M1273 8/30/18 1:57 PM 1801273
81:8001 A0M53 7/18/18 11:35 AM 1801053
81801054 7/18/18 12:02 PM 1801054
61:85051 P0M50 7/18/18 6:56 AM 1801050
M1801007 7/11/18 2:37 PM 1801007
M1801002 7/10/18 4:27 PM 1801002
1158 0A1M000 7/10/18 7:22 AM 1801000
1158 0A1M000 7/10/18 7:22 AM 1801000

Next, we deduped the new formats by event_numberdate_reporteddate_occurred, report_number, location, offense, and dispositionDeduputing resulted in the following:

  • Sept 1, 2017-Aug 31, 2018: decreased from 4377 to 2365 entries

Notes for “Dedupe of daily campus crime logs” files:

  • date_extracted has been excluded from the dedupe process
  • There may be more than one entry for a single incident if disposition changed over time

The last dataset available (as of the date of this blog post) is noted as “Clery data.” This set includes any entry that references sexual assault, domestic or dating violence, or stalking as the offense. The time_occurred field was manually edited (where the entry contained something other than date/time) in order to allow the field to be split into time_occured 1 (i.e date) and time_occurred 2 (i.e. time). Other minor typos were also resolved.

Join Jane at an RDS Brown Bag on April 18

Please join us on Wednesday, April 18th, for an in-depth look into to the Jane Speaks Initiative and the Clery Crime Data Visualization Project. Hosted by UW-Madison’s Research Data Services, RDS Brown Bag is an opportunity for campus members to share and discuss data projects or other topics of interest.

In her talk “From the ashes: How data corruption revitalized our data project,” Kendra Bouda will recount her experiences with data corruption and how the misfortune of data loss actually revitalized her project. Kendra will relate how a variety of data-related hurdles shaped her work on the Clery Crime Data Visualization Project, shifted her perspective on access and reproducibility, and, ultimately, how data corruption transformed project goals.

Date: Wednesday, April 18, noon-1pm
Location: Memorial Library, Room 126
More info: http://researchdata.wisc.edu/holz-series/

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