Data Science isn't Magic

Friday February 20, 2015

This is the flow for a DC Open Data Day 2015 workshop. It may not make sense out of context. For a fun summary in tweets (with photos!) you might check out a storification of it.

View this page as slides to make this site's base URL appear quite large so that people can find this easily.

planspace.org

Workshop Outline

• Intro / Disclaimer
• 80% Definitions (slides)
• Data Science is OSEMN (slides)
• What's the Problem? (slides)
• Find NYC attendance data
  • schools.nyc.gov
  • About Us
  • Our Schools
  • Data About Schools
  • Daily Attendance Rates
  • XML
  • http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/schools/data/attendancexml/
• Data Science Tools (slides)
• Connect to RStudio in the cloud
  • Backup plan:
    • Install the appropriate R distribution for your system from this mirror.
    • Install the RStudio IDE for R. The RStudio site should suggest an appropriate package for your system.
    • Download and unzip the files we're using. (They're on GitHub, so you can clone if you prefer.)
• Working with R
  • Working with one day of data (01-day_attendance.R)
  • Selecting usable data points (02-select_totals.R)
  • The relationship between temperature and attendance (03-merge_and_plot.R)
• Bonus: Introducing the DC voter file

Additional Resources

• For learning R:
  • Try R is an interactive web site that guides you through R functionality in your web browser.
  • The walking introduction to R is an R script that you can open and work through in RStudio.
• For more fun data:
  • Accessing the World Bank Data APIs in Python, R, Ruby & Stata
  • The DC voter registration file