Your midterm exam, on December 1, will test your technical skills. You’ll be expected to be able to do the following. (If the skill lists a few different tools, you don’t have to be able to use all of them; just one. The exam will be open-book.)
- OpenRefine: Reorder and remove columns; cluster and merge fields; remove leading and trailing whitespaces; separate combined values into multiple columns; export project as a CSV.
Excel: Summarize values using pivot tables; create simple bar and pie charts.Sadly, we didn’t have time to learn this skill this year! Sorry about that! If you want to be able to do this (it’s very useful!), check out this tutorial.
- Tableau, Plotly, Fusion Tables, or Datawrapper: Create bar charts, pie charts, and line graphs from spreadsheets.
- HTML and CSS: Create a simple webpage and style it using CSS.
- Google Fusion Tables, MyMaps, or Carto: Geolocate, then map and publish data from a spreadsheet.
- Palladio, Cytoscape, or Fusion Tables: From a spreadsheet containing sources and targets, create a labeled network diagram.
You can practice for the midterm using these datasets:
- American Labor Who’s Who (people involved in the American labor movement)
- Photographs in an archival collection
- Shipwrecks off the coast of New Jersey
- Turner paintings at the Tate Museum