Oct 24-25, 2018
08:30 am - 16:00 pm
Instructors: Martin Dreyer, Zine Sapula
Helpers: TBC
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".
Who: 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.
Where: Building 13, Vaal Library Research Commons. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: Oct 24-25, 2018. Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below). They are also required to abide by Data Carpentry's Code of Conduct.
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:
Contact: Please email eresearch@nwu.ac.za for more information.
Registration: Please register by completing the form at Application Form. Successful candidates will be contacted via email.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| 08:00 -08:30 | Morning Coffee/Tea |
| 08:30-09:30 | Installation of software |
| Data organization in spreadsheets | |
| 09:30-10:15 | Introduction |
| 10:15-10:45 | Formatting data tables in Spreadsheets |
| 10:45-11:00 | Formatting problems |
| 11:00-11:20 | Tea Break |
| 11:20-11:40 | Dates as data |
| 11:40-12:00 | Quality control |
| 12:00-12:15 | Exporting data |
| 12:15-13:00 | Lunch Break |
| OpenRefine for data cleaning | |
| 13:00-13:10 | Introduction |
| 13:10-13:45 | Working with OpenRefine |
| 13:45-14:00 | Filtering and Sorting with OpenRefine |
| 14:00-14:15 | Examining Numbers in OpenRefine |
| 14:15-14:30 | Scripts from OpenRefine |
| 14:30-14:45 | Tea Break |
| 14:45-15:00 | Exporting and Saving Data from OpenRefine |
| 15:00-16:00 | Introduction to R |
| 08:00-08:30 | Morning Coffee/Tea |
| 08:30-10:30 | Starting with data in R |
| 10:30-10:50 | Tea Break |
| 10:50-12:15 | Manipulating and analyzing data with dplyr; Exporting data |
| 12:15-13:00 | Lunch Break |
| 13:00-14:30 | Data visualization with ggplot2 |
| 14:30-14:50 | Tea Break |
| 14:50-16:00 | databases and R |
We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.
To participate in a Data Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
When you're writing code, it's nice to have a text editor that is
optimized for writing code, with features like automatic
color-coding of key words. The default text editor on macOS and
Linux is usually set to Vim, which is not famous for being
intuitive. If you accidentally find yourself stuck in it, try
typing the escape key, followed by :q! (colon, lower-case 'q',
exclamation mark), then hitting Return to return to the shell.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. To install it, download the Data Carpentry Windows installer and double click on the file to run it. This installer requires an active internet connection.
Others editors that you can use are Notepad++ or Sublime Text. Be aware that you must add its installation directory to your system path. Please ask your instructor to help you do this.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. See the Git installation video tutorial for an example on how to open nano. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Text Wrangler or Sublime Text.
nano is a basic editor and the default that instructors use in the workshop. It should be pre-installed.
Others editors that you can use are Gedit, Kate or Sublime Text.
R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we use RStudio.
Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE. Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on .exe file and select "Run as administrator" instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.
Install R by downloading and running this .pkg file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE.
You can download the binary files for your distribution
from CRAN. Or
you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu
run sudo apt-get install r-base and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install R). Also, please install the
RStudio IDE.
For this lesson you will need OpenRefine and a web browser. Note: this is a Java program that runs on your machine (not in the cloud). It runs inside a web browser, but no web connection is needed.
Check that you have either the Firefox or the Chrome browser installed and set as your default browser. OpenRefine runs in your default browser. It will not run correctly in Internet Explorer.
Download software from http://openrefine.org/
Create a new directory called OpenRefine.
Unzip the downloaded file into the OpenRefine directory by right-clicking and selecting "Extract ...".
Go to your newly created OpenRefine directory.
Launch OpenRefine by clicking google-refine.exe (this will launch a command prompt window, but you can ignore that - just wait for OpenRefine to open in the browser).
If you are using a different browser, or if OpenRefine does not automatically open for you, point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:3333/ or http://localhost:3333 to use the program.
Check that you have either the Firefox or the Chrome browser installed and set as your default browser. OpenRefine runs in your default browser. It may not run correctly in Safari.
Download software from http://openrefine.org/.
Create a new directory called OpenRefine.
Unzip the downloaded file into the OpenRefine directory by double-clicking it.
Go to your newly created OpenRefine directory.
Launch OpenRefine by dragging the icon into the Applications folder.
Use Ctrl-click/Open ... to launch it.
If you are using a different browser, or if OpenRefine does not automatically open for you, point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:3333/ or http://localhost:3333 to use the program.
Check that you have either the Firefox or the Chrome browser installed and set as your default browser. OpenRefine runs in your default browser.
Download software from http://openrefine.org/.
Make a directory called OpenRefine.
Unzip the downloaded file into the OpenRefine directory.
Go to your newly created OpenRefine directory.
Launch OpenRefine by entering ./refine into the terminal within the OpenRefine directory.
If you are using a different browser, or if OpenRefine does not automatically open for you, point your browser at http://127.0.0.1:3333/ or http://localhost:3333 to use the program.