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Data Wrangling & Visualization

Data Wrangling

Data cleaning with OpenRefine workshop

DH Project profile: Dunham’s Data

• Look at DV videos: https://dunhamsdata.org/blog/work-in-progress-videos-1
• Read blog post, “Datasets are Research”
• Write a reflection about it.

Data exploration activity

Take notes on your observation & be ready to share back:

1. Find a dataset you’d like to explore

• What’s the subject?
• Why did you choose it?
• How was the data collected?
• What types of data does it include? E.G numbers, dates, geographic locations, controlled categories, strings.
• What do you want to show others about your data?

1. Use Excel, OpenRefine, or Data Basic to start exploring your data. What stories or observations emerge? How might you want to display or visualize it?

2. Create one or two visualizations of your data using one of the tools we’ve discussed (Palladio, Raw Graphs, Excel, etc.). Need ideas for picking an appropriate type of viz? Check out from Data to Viz

3. Optional: draw your own data viz.

Resources

Sources for datasets

• Open Data Philly
• Data is Plural Newsletter

Data viz tools

• Raw graphs
• MS Excel - pivot tables & charts
• ObservableHQ - an interactive creative coding platform
  • D3 Javascript tutorial using ObservableHQ
• Tableau Public
• Programming languages
  • Javascript D3
  • R; plotly
  • Python: Seaborn, Altair
• Palladio

Other resources

• Fun data viz examples:
  • The Pudding - data viz essays. See also their blog post, “Working with Data”
  • Makeover Monday – data viz makeovers!
• Data Carpentries workshop: data organization for social scientists

NB correlation is not causation - see spurious correlations