SodaCamp 001: The art of spreadsheets

This afternoon workshop is a condensed version of the Macedonian sessions run by the School of Data. The intent is to familiarise ourselves with the basic “hammer” of data wrangling: the humble spreadsheet. At the same time we will bend the rules a little and show some creative things you can do with a bunch of cells. For background information, see School of Data Switzerland and Soda.Camp.

13.00 – 13.15

Short introduction round, talk about what we aim to accomplish, basic concepts of machine-readable data. Warm-up exercise: open up a spreadsheet and in 3 minutes fill it with words that come to mind when thinking of numbers/statistics/data. Now sketch on paper how it makes you feel when someone tries to convince you of something you don't want to hear with these kinds of things.

13.15 – 14.30

Overview of data portals and other sources, tips on how to search for data effectively, intro to http://datahub.io and other open data sites. Where to find/borrow/scrape data, get help finding data, create your own data, use random data. How to ensure data quality and trustworthiness, verify sources, good (as in legal and respectful) practices in working with data. The ethics of data art and creative license. If any of these are sticky points, we will spend more time.

14.45 – 15.30

After a short break, we will learn how to manage a table using commands like SUMIF and VLOOKUP, explore data better using pivot tables and talk about where to learn more advanced techniques. We will then prepare tables for printing, Web sites, and visualisations using tools like D3 and Tableau. We will discuss what mastery of spreadsheets entails?

15.30 – 16.30

We will end the workshop by making art right in the same place where we were doing data analysis minutes before. Or feel free to continue practicing your spreadsheet-fu, as each participant prefers. We can talk about the notion of generative art, the many styles of interacting and working with data, and some of the different ways symbolic information is perceived and interpreted by the brain.