General Information

Data Carpentry workshops are for any researcher who has data they want to analyze, and no prior computational experience is required. This hands-on workshop teaches basic concepts, skills and tools for working more effectively with data.

Participants should bring their laptops and plan to participate actively. By the end of the workshop learners should be able to more effectively manage and analyze data and be able to apply the tools and approaches directly to their ongoing research.

Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers.

Where: Norwich Research Park, Norwich, NR4 7UG. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating sytem (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.

Contact: Please mail training@earlham.ac.uk for more information.

Registration: Please see the Earlham Institute webpage for more information.

---

Preliminary Schedule

Schedule

Dataset

We will using the ecology datset for the purposes of this workshop. Please click here to access this.

Day 1 - 9:00-17:00

Data organization in spreadsheets

1. Introduction
2. Formatting data
3. Common formatting problems
4. Dates as data
5. Quality control
6. Exporting data
7. Data Format Caveats (optional)

Data cleaning with OpenRefine

1. Getting Started with OpenRefine
2. Working with OpenRefine - faceting, clustering & splitting
3. Scripts
4. Saving and Exporting Projects and Files

Introduction to R

1. Before we start
2. Introduction to R
3. Starting with data
4. Introducing data.frame

Day 2 - 09:00-17:00

Data analysis and visualization in R

1. Data analysis
2. Data visualisation with ggplot2

SQL for data management

1. Introduction to SQL
2. Basic queries
3. Aggregation
4. Joins and aliases
5. R and SQL (optional)

---

Surveys

Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Post-workshop Survey

Etherpad

We will use this Etherpad for chatting, taking notes, sharing URLs and bits of code and interacting with the remote site.

---

Requirements

You will need to bring a laptop with some required software already installed in order to attend the bootcamp. Please let us know as soon as possible if you are not able to bring your own laptop.

The easiest way to get set up with the prerequisites for the bootcamp is to install the preconfigured virtual machine (VM). This VM contains the Linux operating system and all the software needed. As such, we suggest that participants bring their laptop with NoMachine installed.

If you are confident to install the requirements on your own laptop, please follow the setup directions below.

Setup

To participate in a Data Carpentry workshop, you will need working copies of the described software. Please make sure to install everything (or at least to download the installers) before the start of your workshop. Participants should bring and use their own laptops to insure the proper setup of tools for an efficient workflow once you leave the workshop.

Please follow these Setup Instructions.

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.