💻 Week 02 - Class Roadmap (90 min)

2023/24 Winter Term

Welcome to the second seminar/lab class of DS101W.

This week’s content is more hands-on. We will work with Python to explore, pre-process and tidy data. You will see how data scientists use programming to make their work more efficient.

Step 01 - Google Colab Setup (5 min)

Please follow the instructions below to set up the account:

1. Create a Google Account, in case you don’t have one already.

2. Go to the Colab website here

3. Click on the ‘New Notebook’ button.

4. It will open an ‘Untitled.ipynb’ notebook. [Note: .ipynb is the extension for Jupyter Python notebooks].

5. To rename your file, click on the ‘Untitled.ipynb’ and it will allow you to edit it, as below:

5. You can click on ‘+ Code’ to add a code block, and ‘+ Text’ to add a text block.

6. Voila! Your first Jupyter Notebook is ready to go!

Step 02 - Reflection on the data tidying task (20min)

• Share your CSVs with others on your class Slack channel (i.e #class-channel).
• In groups, discuss how you collected data from Wikipedia and how your tidy data representations diverge.
• Share your observations with the wider class. What did you learn? Any particular difficulties/challenges encountered when tidying data?

Step 03 - Tidying data programmatically (45-50 min)

• Your class teacher will demonstrate how one could use Python (and packages called BeautifulSoup and pandas) to extract data from Wikipedia and tidy that data. The script that was shown in class can be found here
• You can try and follow along the Python program demonstration on Google Colab.