Best practices in data organisation with spreadsheets
Speakers:
Bio: Aleksandra Nenadic is the Training Lead at the UK's Software Sustainability Institute based at the University of Manchester committed to ongoing improvement of research software practice through training and community engagement work. Aleksandra is working to improve the provision and access to training in foundational computational and data analysis skills for researchers and scientists and is advocating for openness, reproducibility, collaboration and inclusion in research. Aleksandra volunteers in several open communities and serves on the Executive Council of The Carpentries, an international community teaching foundational coding and data science skills to researchers worldwide.
Peter Smyth, The University of Manchester
Good data organisation is the foundation of any (research) project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets; but we often organise such data in the ways that we as humans want to work with data. However; in order to use tools that make computation and data analysis more efficient; reusable and reproducible; we need to structure our data in a particular way so that computers can “understand” and “make use of” the data. We will cover best practices for using spreadsheets for good data organisation and what some common mistakes with formatting data in spreadsheets are. You may also be interested in the short course on "Data cleaning with OpenRefine” to prepare your data for analysis happenning on Tuesday afternoon.