This is an alpha lesson to teach Data Management with SQL for …
This is an alpha lesson to teach Data Management with SQL for Social Scientists, We welcome and criticism, or error; and will take your feedback into account to improve both the presentation and the content. Databases are useful for both storing and using data effectively. Using a relational database serves several purposes. It keeps your data separate from your analysis. This means there’s no risk of accidentally changing data when you analyze it. If we get new data we can rerun a query to find all the data that meets certain criteria. It’s fast, even for large amounts of data. It improves quality control of data entry (type constraints and use of forms in Access, Filemaker, etc.) The concepts of relational database querying are core to understanding how to do similar things using programming languages such as R or Python. This lesson will teach you what relational databases are, how you can load data into them and how you can query databases to extract just the information that you need.
Lesson on spreadsheets for social scientists. Good data organization is the foundation …
Lesson on spreadsheets for social scientists. Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets, so it’s the place that many research projects start. Typically we organize data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with the data. However computers require data to be organized in particular ways. In order to use tools that make computation more efficient, such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers need the data. Since this is where most research projects start, this is where we want to start too! In this lesson, you will learn: Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets How to avoid common formatting mistakes Approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets Basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets Exporting data from spreadsheets In this lesson, however, you will not learn about data analysis with spreadsheets. Much of your time as a researcher will be spent in the initial ‘data wrangling’ stage, where you need to organize the data to perform a proper analysis later. It’s not the most fun, but it is necessary. In this lesson you will learn how to think about data organization and some practices for more effective data wrangling. With this approach you can better format current data and plan new data collection so less data wrangling is needed.
Lesson on OpenRefine for social scientists. A part of the data workflow …
Lesson on OpenRefine for social scientists. A part of the data workflow is preparing the data for analysis. Some of this involves data cleaning, where errors in the data are identifed and corrected or formatting made consistent. This step must be taken with the same care and attention to reproducibility as the analysis. OpenRefine (formerly Google Refine) is a powerful free and open source tool for working with messy data: cleaning it and transforming it from one format into another. This lesson will teach you to use OpenRefine to effectively clean and format data and automatically track any changes that you make. Many people comment that this tool saves them literally months of work trying to make these edits by hand.
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