Curriculum

9 Sections
50 Lessons
Lifetime

Expand all sectionsCollapse all sections

What is Data?
This course gives a short introduction in the world of data. If you are starting your journey into this wonderful land, this course is for you. The course covers basic concepts, different types of data and gives an introduction to machine readable data.
6
Finding Data
Don't know where to start looking for data? This section gives an introduction to data portals and different data sources. Finally we will walk you through how to use one sample data portal.
5
Sort and Filter: The basics of spreadsheets
So you found and downloaded your dataset? What now? Sort and Filter introduces a powerful tool to manage data: Spreadsheets. Based on Google Spreadsheets, this Course introduces the basic functions as well how to sort and filter data to find what you might be interested in…
8
Taming the Fierce Beast – The Math you need to start
Worried about all those numbers? This module will help you to refresh the basic math (don't be afraid it's mainly counting and adding).
10
'But what does it mean?': Analyzing data (spreadsheets continued)
Wonder how to make sense of the data? Basic Analysis will help you to understand what your data might mean. It also introduces spreadsheet formulas and helps you calculate more values out of what you already have.
4
From Data to Diagrams: An introduction to plots and charts
A picture says more than a thousand words – yeah but how do we turn a thousand words into a picture? This section will help you to understand basic data visualization and create them using Google spreadsheets. Visualizing data will help you to better understand the data you are handling.
7
Look Out!: Common Misconceptions and how to avoid them
Not everything is easily understood in dataland. In this course we give a short overview over common pitfalls when talking about data and how to avoid them. It can help you avoid the mistakes made as well as read other peoples claims more carefully. If you want to learn what to watch out for: join in!
9
Tell me a story: Working out what’s interesting in your data
Data alone is meaningless and often boring. To understand it better you will need context. In this section we will talk about how to publish the data we worked on throughout the basic track. We will talk about how to identify key points of your data to help you use data to make your voice heard.
6
Data provenance
To make a credible and sustainable data project, you need to document your steps right from the beginning. This course contains tips and tricks and tools for doing so.
3

Finding out what’s special – Z-Scores

Z or standard scores are a good way to figure out what is special. Let’s say you have election results and want to find places that are interesting to report on. One thing you can do is figure out where a party has done exceptionally well. Z-Scores are great for this.

The Z-Score of a measurement is calculated as

(x – mean)/standard deviation.

The Z-Score gives you a value’s distance in standard deviations from the mean. You can now set arbitrary limits and say: places where the votes with a Z-score higher than 2 are interesting because this means that extraordinarily many people voted for a specific party. A Z-score below -2 is also interesting because exceptionally few people voted. You can make this a little finer by looking at Z-scores for counties or regions (often there are regional differences and so on). Remember – 95.45 percent of measures fall into 2 standard deviations from the mean (if you have normally distrubuted data) this means: there is less than a 5 percent change for the Z score to be higher (or lower) than 2. 5% makes you pretty stand out. Not enough: 3 Standard deviations give you less than 1% of chance (99.73% of points are within 3 standard deviations from the mean in a normal distribution).

Overall, the Z-Score is a handy addition to your toolbox for figuring out what data values are different.

Normalizing Data – aka. comparing things

Data Fundamentals

Curriculum

Finding out what’s special – Z-Scores

Modal title