Curriculum

9 Sections
50 Lessons
Lifetime

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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

Showing geographical data – mapping

In our case we do not only have numerical data but we also have numerical data that is linked to geographical places. This calls for a map! Whenever you have a large number of countries or regions, displaying data on a map helps. If you have countries or regions you usually create a choropleth map. This special type of map displays values for a specific region as colours on that region. An example of a choropleth map from our data is shown below:

The map shows health care expenditure in % of GDP. It allows us to discover find interesting aspects of our dataset. E.g. Western Europe is spending more on healthcare in %GDP than eastern Europe and Liberia spends more than any other state in Africa.

Some things to be aware of when using choropleth maps:

One shortcoming of choropleth maps are the fact that bigger regions or countries attract most attention, so smaller regions may get lost.
Pay attention to colour-sclae. The standard red-green colour scale is not very well suited for a variety of reasons such as making it difficult for colour-blind observers (Read more about this in Gregor Aisch’s post in the Further Reading section). Single hued colour scales are in most cases easier to guess. If your range of values becomes too big it will be hard to single out things

Task: Try another set of data on a choropleth. How does it work?

Presenting data from categories over time – linecharts

Data Fundamentals

Curriculum

Showing geographical data – mapping

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