Data Carpentry for Social Sciences

Course Description

A Data Carpentry workshop aims to teach researchers basic concepts, skills and tools for working with data to get research done more efficiently and reproducibly.

The Data Carpentry for Social Sciences is a hands-on, two-days training that covers best practices for data organisation in spreadsheets, reproducible data cleaning, and gives an introduction to data analysis and visualisation using the programming language R.

You will be learning best practices and exploring tools that are the building blocks for creating reproducible and efficient workflows that make your data re-usable.

Target Audience

This workshop is useful for all PhD candidates and researchers with little to no prior computational experience who are working with tabular data.

The tabular dataset used for practice during the course comes from the social sciences field (that is, survey data in a tabular form).

Learning Objectives

After this course, learners:

• organise tabular data in the way they are required for working with computational tools
• carry out quality control and quality assurance and export data to use with downstream applications
• explore, summarise, and clean tabular data reproducibly using OpenRefine
• import data, calculate summary statistics, and create publication-quality graphics using the programming language R

Course setup

The Data Carpentry for Social Sciences is a two-day, hands-on workshop. 

In the class, short tutorials alternate with practical exercises, and most of the instruction is done via live coding. You will have the assistance of helpers in the room in case you get stuck with any task and/or scripting.

The workshops run from 09:00 until 17:00 hrs each day, with short breaks (app. every 1 - 1.5 hours) and lunch break in between.

The total workload of the course is approximately 18 hours (including preparation time before the workshop), equivalent to 1.5 GS credits in the Research Skills category of the GS Education program. 

It is expected that you will actively participate in the exercises and discussions prepared by the instructor.

Course Programme

Workshop Day 1

• Introduction to R
• Data Organization in Spreadsheets
• OpenRefine
• Starting with Data in R 

Workshop Day 2

• Data Wrangling with R 
• Introduction to Quarto
• Data Visualization with R

Prerequisites

This workshop is useful for all PhD candidates and researchers with little to no prior computational experience who are working with tabular data. This is a basic/introductory course.

You will need to allocate approximately 2  hours of preparatory work before the first class of the workshop in order to:

• fill in a pre-workshop survey to help the instructor to get an overview of the learners previous experience with programming and adjust content and pace accordingly (you will receive an email with the link to the survey).
• install the software and download the datasets that you will use during the workshop

Registration

Upcoming Data Carpentry for Social Sciences workshop: 10 and 11 February 2025 at 09:00 - 17:00 hrs each day; Location: Digital Lab (room 0.09), Humanities Hub, Johan Huizinga building (Doelensteeg 16, 2311 VL Leiden). To register please use the following link

Questions?

If you have any questions about the course, please contact: RDMtraining-lib@tudelft.nl.