DVS Workshop: Basic Data Cleaning and Analysis for Data Tables

Tables of data, like those you see in spreadsheets or relational databases, are the foundation of most data-driven research today. There are many pitfalls of working with these tables, though, that most people end up having to learn the hard way. In this workshop, we'll take a dataset that has a variety of different properties and learn to work through many common steps of data-driven research to clean and begin analyzing the data. We'll be using Excel to make sure the methods we suggest can be reproduced easily "at home," but many of these techniques are important for other data analysis tools as well. No data experience necessary.