The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) – part of Research Data Services within the Stanford Libraries – is a team of humanists and social scientists who collaborate with scholars to provide instruction, consulting, and development support for data intensive research and digital scholarship. Whether you need help framing your research question into a form you can use digital methods to answer, or aren’t sure where to find data for your project, or need a hand with a particularly tricky piece of analysis or visualization code, CIDR can help you overcome the barriers to doing data science and digital scholarship.

CIDR provides embedded research support, through a partnership between the library and academic departments, divisions, and research groups. This program provides departments with an embedded staff member with deep technical expertise as well as an academic background in the field. Faculty and students in Anthropology, CESTA, DLCL, and History can reach out directly to their embedded staff person for consultation and hands-on assistance.

CIDR leads the library’s efforts to curate and make accessible its sizable humanities and social science datasets. In collaboration with the Social Science, Humanities, and Area Studies Bibliographers, CIDR’s Research Data Curator accessions new data acquisitions into our collections. Our goal is to make library data collections FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable), coordinating with our technical and digital library teams to leverage existing and emerging tools and services. Internally, CIDR helps to manage the Stanford Data Farm, Stanford’s exploration tool for research datasets, and works closely with the Stanford Digital Repository and cataloging teams to ensure our data collections are readily findable and computable.

For faculty scholarship projects, CIDR runs a program that connects these projects with our developer team for a period of intensive work and close collaboration, in order to develop field-changing new tools and digital resources. Read more about our developer program, which has a rolling deadline for applications.

Software and Services for Data Science, CIDR’s primary service point located in the Velma Denning Room, Rm. 120F on the first floor of Green Library, offers training and consulting around the selection and use of quantitative (statistical) software, data science, and the Text Analysis and Machine Learning Working Group.

Got a question for CIDR? Send us an email at contact-cidr@stanford.edu.