Social Sciences Data Carpentry

Venue:
Blue 3
Information Technology Building
University of Pretoria
Hatfield Campus

General Information

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners' existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing".

Target audience:

The course is aimed at graduate students, staff and other researchers. We have enough space for 20 Participants, but we have a waiting list so please feel free to sign up. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

What will be covered:

During the 2.5 day workshop the following programmes and concepts will be introduced:

Data Organization in Spreadsheets
- Learn how to organize tabular data, handle date formatting, carry out quality control and quality assurance and export data to use with downstream applications.

Data Cleaning with OpenRefine
- Explore, summarize, and clean tabular data reproducibly.

Data Analysis and Vizualization with Python
- Import data into Python, calculate summary statistics, and create publication-quality graphics.

Requirements:

Workstations will be supplied but it is recommended that participants bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They are also required to abide by Data Carpentry's Code of Conduct.

Workshop #1: Social Sciences Data Carpentry