What we teach students
What are we teaching students in the course?
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
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.