Wild-caught data

Open data is a raw material for the digital age but unlike coal, timber or diamonds, it can be used by anyone and everyone at the same time. This unit will equip you with the skills to find, access, process, and prepare open data for further analyses. There are many ways that data can be collected, via experiments, observation, sampling, or sensors. There are many different formats, such as csv, JSON, spatial polygons, or html tables, to learn how to read. Accessing data might be through a database query, a GUI, an API, or scraping web sites. You will also learn about ethics and privacy issues with using open data, and how effectively curate your own open data.