Faculty Workshops, January 2016

This guide contains materials used at the workshops as well as supplemental information.

Workshop Description

Using Data to Communicate

This is your chance to learn some of those basic spreadsheet skills you’ve always wanted to!  We’ll provide some sample data sets and show you some things that you can do: how to make some basic graphs/plots (grade distributions in courses for instance), how to perform some basic manipulations on data (how to calculate semester totals, how to sort data), and how to apply some of these tools to different kinds of datasets.

Workshop Outline

10:00 - 10:05
Sawyer 328		 Overview and Introduction
Lee Park and Jonathan Leamon

10:05 - 10:45
Sawyer 328

Working with Data: The Russian Sisters Project
Bill Wagner

As part of a larger research project, Bill Wagner converted the original life records of 19th and early 20th century Russian nuns into a database format that could not only be analyzed to provide answers to research questions, but was also easier to preserve, access, and share than the original paper. Bill will talk about the process of developing the database and capturing the data, as well as the role the data plays in his research.
10:45 - 12:00
Sawyer 328

Manipulating and Presenting Data, part 1
Lee Park and Matt Carter

Lee Park will do a short introduction to some basic spreadsheet tools, and Matt Carter will discuss strategies used by professional designers to optimize visual elements in graphs, charts, and tables so that data is presented in the best possible light.
12:00 - 1:00
Sawyer 430

Lunch

Manipulating and Presenting Data, part 2
Jonathan Leamon

From their use in Committee meetings to monographs, spreadsheets such as Excel and Google Sheets are an effective way to organize and analyze information in publications and presentations. Jonathan Leamon will demonstrate how to sort, filter and total data, create graphs, and use pivot tables to extract and aggregate subsets of data from a large data set using the data presented by Bill Wagner as well as data used by the Calendar and Schedule committee, 

Workshop Materials