What is data?

Introductions

Course goals

Syllabus

What is data?

Brainstorm: how might you use data if you were…

• …a librarian?
• …a police officer?
• …a small shoe store owner?
• …a general manager of a professional basketball franchise?

Policing

Retail

Sports

Data science

Science and business: StitchFix

• StitchFix; Recommender systems for styles

What you will learn in this course

This course covers the process of exploratory data analysis, which includes how to:

• Find data
• Load data
• Clean data
• Summarize data
• Visualize data
• Present data
• Example question: what are the most popular female baby names in Texas, and how has this changed over time?

Finding data

Loading and cleaning data

Summarizing data

Visualizing data

Presenting data

Python

• Your main tool: the Python programming language
• More to come on Python next week!

Google CoLab

• Google Colaboratory: our tool for using Python in the cloud
• Let’s explore…

Assignment 1: Data journalism

• Data journalism: movement in journalism toward interactive, data-driven content
• Popular publications: The Upshot (New York Times), FiveThirtyEight, The Guardian, ProPublica, many more

Your task:

• Find an example of data journalism from the past five years in a recognized publication
• Write a response that 1) summarizes the article, 2) discusses its data sources, and 3) discusses its methods of analysis and visualization.
  
• At least one paragraph, no longer than four paragraphs