Week 1: Your Data Explorer Mission: Here’s the Brief
Good day, Agent.
We’ve detected something in the atmosphere. We think it might be…data.
Your Mission, if you choose to accept it, is to spend some quality time with your data before your first meeting with your fellow Data Agents.
Here is the dataset you’ll be starting with–it’s a tally of global Carbon Dioxide emissions. As the Mission progresses, you may find yourself combining different data with it or hunting for more up to date data for your country, the possibilities are endless: http://bit.ly/CO2_data
For a bit more background, this data set came from the following source: http://www.eia.gov/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm. For further briefing, you may want to examine The Guardian article in which this data set first appeared: Guardian Article
Don’t be overwhelmed–this is not Mission: Difficult. But your are instructed to make a copy and familiarize yourself with the data.
Action Items:
- Look for trends and make notes to yourself. What piques your interest about this dataset? What potential stories are there?
- Find a question. Come to your first meeting with a potential question you’d want to answer with the dataset you’ve been given.
- Acquaint yourself with your toolset:
- Doodle to schedule the regular weekly meeting: http://www.doodle.com/
- Google+ for meetings: http://www.google.com/+/learnmore/hangouts/
- Etherpad for notes: http://pad.p2pu.org/
- Badges.p2pu.org: create an account and read http://badges.p2pu.org/en/about
If you are the first person to receive this, please create a Doodle poll for your team of Data Agents, fill in your availability on a regular weekly basis for a 30-minute meeting, and share that poll with your team.
It is also requested that you introduce yourself to your fellow Agents by sharing a piece of data about yourself that is available on the internet.
Your next message will hold activities for your Google Hangout rendezvous. Please solidify your weekly meeting time in the next 72 hours, and decide who will begin the Hangout. Might be a good idea for this person to be the Facilitator for the first meeting.
This message will not self-destruct. In fact, it will be up on https://schoolofdata.org/datamooc/ for your reference.
Emergency reinforcement is available via [email protected].
-Mission Control