Tidy Data for Humanists - 2021

A University of Pennsylvania Dream Lab course originally offered online June 14-17 2021.

Instructor: Matthew Lincoln

Teaching Assistant: Shack Hackney

Marie Kondo Cradling an Excel Spreadsheet

Many tools and tutorials promise to help you clean up your messy data, which is an essential step before doing any kind of network, text, spatial, or quantitative analysis or visualization. But how do we even figure out what “clean” means when it comes to complex humanities knowledge, especially when we may not yet know what kind of analysis we eventually want to do?

Participants will come out of this class understanding how to create a data plan to capture the parts of their sources that are going to be important for their research questions, handle complex relationships and uncertainty, and format that information into tidy data that can then be reshaped as needed to drive databases, websites, analyses, and visualizations.

Go to the course schedule