Welcome to Teaching with Data! The goal is to provide a useful resource for teachers trying to incorporate data analysis and visualization into their courses. If you are unfamiliar with data analysis, no worries! We will start by covering the basics.
What is data, and what can I do with it? For interesting, inspiring, and sometimes beautiful examples of data analysis and visualization, take a look at Tableau’s Viz of the Day, the homepage of Data Journalism, or storytelling with data.
My background is in area studies and international security, so many of the data examples will be related to those topics, but the ideas and processes can apply to any topic. Whatever your field, the key is to have/develop questions you or your students would like to answer, then find relevant data. Free data is widely available and we will look at useful resources in a future chapter, but don’t rely on me – often a simple search is all that is required to find useful datasets. Once you have the data and questions, you can harness the data analysis skills we are about to learn to explore answers, refine and develop new questions, and share your results with others.
Leave a Reply