For students of The Data Institute, a collaboration between the Center for Journalism & Democracy and the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.
We'll use this page to add all the materials used to teach the 2023 Data Institute: slides, exercises, links, and homework. This is not an online course and won't have all the context or instruction to be a standalone class.
Want to use our slides? Our teaching materials fall under the Creative Commons license.
Week 1:
- Day 1: Intro to Data Journalism, Spreadsheets, Best Practices
- Day 2: Evaluating data, Open Refine, Analyzing One Variable
- Day 3: Intro to Mapping, Common Calculations in News, Analyzing Two Variables, Statistics
- Day 4: Visualizing Data, Charts and Maps
- Day 5: Intro to Code, How Websites Work, HTML, CSS
Week 2:
- Day 6: Intro to Design, Type, Layout & Color, Making a Webpage with Github
- Day 7: Web Scraping, Fundamentals of Programming
- Day 8: Even More Web Scraping
- Day 9: Continuing learning / Field Trip
- Day 10: Final Presentations
ACCOUNTS
- Github.com
(Make sure to confirm your e-mail address) - Google.com
- Datawrapper
SOFTWARE
- Google Chrome - Everything we'll be teaching you about previewing and testing code will work in other browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer, but each browser designs how it works a little differently. Since we'll be demoing everything in Chrome, it'll be easiest for you to follow along.
- Slack (Mac, Windows) - All of you should have received an invite to join the Data Institute Slack. If you've never used Slack before, it's basically a place where you can message with a group of people. You need both an account (which you should be able to set up based on your email invitation) and we want you to download the desktop app (which you can do by clicking on the Mac or Windows link above).
- Sublime Text (Mac, Windows) - This app is where we're going to be writing all our code. It's completely free, and will occassionally ask you if you'd like to pay, but payment is not required. For both beginners and experts, Sublime is one of the best apps for coding.
- Github Desktop App - an app to simplify your Github experience.
- Tabula (Mac, Windows) - Your best friend for when you have a huge stack of data tables in PDF format and need to turn it into actual data you can use.
- Open Refine (Mac, Windows) - A great tool to help you clean data (ex: it can recognize that "Saint Paul" and "St. Paul" maybe refer to the same city in Minnesota)
- If you're on a Mac, and you get the error that Google/Open Refine is damaged, follow these instructions.
Monday, July 10
Tuesday, July 11
Wednesday, July 12
Basic Geographic Data
Thursday, July 13
Intro to visualizing data
Friday, July 14
In-Class Demos
- What coding languages have you heard of?
- Using the web inspector
In-Class Demos
- How to create your first HTML file
- Shortcut to the basic HTML template
- How to use:
<h1><h2><h3><p>
- Let's look up together:
<img><a>
- Can you figure out:
- How do you make a bulleted list?
Exercises
- Can you fix this broken code?
In-Class Demos
- How to create your first CSS file
- Shortcut to linking to your CSS file
- How CSS styles work
Copy and paste this code and follow the instructions inside to format the page.
Monday, July 17
Tuesday, July 18
In-Class Demos
- Introduction to Web Scraping
- Thinking through how to scrape this website
- Download and unzip this folder into your "Code" folder on your computer
- Fundamentals of Programming
- Want to review later? Everything we're covering is laid out here.
Exercises
We'll do the first two together, and you'll do the rest on your own.
- Write a function, named
copycat, that simply prints out whatever input it's given. - Write a function, named
addition, that when given any three numbers, will print out the total sum of all three numbers. - Write a function, named
conversion, that when given the Fahrenheit temperature, will print out what it is in Celsius. The formula you can use is:C = (F – 32) * 5/9 - Write a function, named
find_the_max, that given any three numbers, will print out the bigger number. Python has the native ability to do this, using the functionmax(). Do not use it. Instead write this from scratch. - For an extra challenge: Given the following data, write a function, named
total_students, that calculates how many total students are enrolled in Hogwarts.
pupils_by_year = [["first years", 40], ["second years", 40], ["third years", 38], ["fourth years", 35], ["fifth years", 30], ["sixth years", 29], ["seventh years", 23]]
Homework
- Start thinking what you'd like to present on Friday (we'll have class time to work on it on Thursday).
- See if you can write yourself any other functions. It'll help you gear up for tomorrow.
Wednesday, July 19
In-Class Demos
- Even more web scraping!
Homework
- Continue thinking about your presentation - Some starter thoughts:
- General: What did you learn? What can you do now that you could not do 2 weeks ago? What were the biggest challenges/setbacks/frustrations you faced? The biggest surprises/succeses/most awesome things you accomplished?
- What would you like to present? a portfolio, a dataset you analyzed, a data visualization you created? What are you proud of? What are the next steps you want to take? What are your ultimate goals for your work with data, design and/or code?
- If you would like to make a portfolio, here's a handy guide from Lena!
Thursday, July 20 - Field trip day!
In the morning, we'll meetup in the library space - from 9:30 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. for a discussion about how to keep learning after the Data Institute and some work time. Then you can drop off your stuff at the dorm, before heading downtown for lunch and discussion.
At 12:30pm, we'll meet up at the Center for Public Integrity's office downtown, 910 17th St NW, on the 11th floor. We'll meet folks from the Center for Public Integrity and Accountability Project. We'll likely wrap up mid-afternoon and then you can explore downtown on your own.
The AAJA Convention is happening downtown as well. There is a Mid-Atlantic chapter meetup at 7 p.m. (details in Slack). On Friday evening, there's a news nerd meetup as well.
Friday, July 21 - Celebration and final presentations
Presentations - we'd love to hear a highlight of something you've learned from the Data Institute. Each person will have about 5 minutes to jump to the front of the room, plug in your laptop if you would like to, and share something from the Data Institute. This is super laid back and celebratory! It could be related to a project you were thinking about coming into the Data Institute and you have new ideas for from what you learned, or it could be just a few minutes about one concept you really loved and keep thinking about. We'll chat more about this on Thursday. Feel free to reach out to Erika with any questions sooner than that though!