What we teach students

What are we teaching students in the course?

Through a series of lectures, practical sessions and a group project, the course introduced to the importance of data, the details of how to work with it in a robust, communicative and defensible manner, and the computational grounding that underpins this work.

• simple descriptive statistics;
• exploratory visual analysis;
• finding, combining and relating datasets (data wrangling);
• understanding of Open Data;
• how to draw inferences from data.
• data visualisation will be used for both exploration and presentation, drawing on techniques from
• data journalism.
• understanding the ways in which data relates to the world: the social and political structures of its collection and use, personal data, aesthetics and communication of findings.
• data ethics and data protection

All these topics will be build around a particular problem (the data challenge) will help you to understand how to collaboratively create software around data, and how to work with a problem holder to collect, analyze and present data sets of social relevance.

Course structure

• The beginning of the course is focussed on basic programming and data handling skills.
• start out individually, making sure that everyone has competence with basic programming and data handling activities. This will lead to Assignment 1, which is carried out individually.
• In Week 4, you will form small teams around a particular “data challenge”, an external partner who brings interesting research data and analysis questions. This project will carry on for the rest of the course
• The second assignment will be carried out individually, but based on your group’s data - this shows that everyone had developed a self-led practice around data, and also works as the exploratory data analysis for your project.
• As the course progresses, we look at the wider issues around working with data, from sketching and visualisation, through ethics, to finding modelling and classifying data.
• The third assignment is a group project, demonstrating your ability to communicate what you have found in the data in a rich and appropriate manner.