/python-data-nicar2019

Intro to Python for data analysis (NICAR 2019)

Primary LanguageJupyter Notebook

Python 1: The fundamentals

Teacher: Sandra Fish, independent journalist

Coach: Lam Thuy Vo, BuzzFeed News

Description: Learning a programming language is much like learning to write a news story. There are certain styles and conventions to follow, a standard order, etc. In this session geared toward absolute beginners, we’ll get started with some of the basics of this new language. This session is good for: People who are comfortable working with data in spreadsheets or database managers and want to make the leap to programming.

Python 2: Intro to data analysis using pandas

Teacher: Lam Thuy Vo, Buzzfeed News

Coach: Karrie Kehoe, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Description: Imagine rolling Excel and MySQL into one tool that also allows you to track your code and share it. That’s Pandas in a nutshell. There’s a lot more you can do with it, of course, but this will be a good start. We’ll learn how to slice and dice our data and extract basic stats. Specifically, we’ll cover loading the data, filtering, sorting and grouping data. This class is good for: People who are comfortable with Excel and are familiar with the basics of SQL and Python.

Python 3: Data cleaning and visualization

Teacher: Karrie Kehoe, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists

Coach: Sandra Fish, independent journalist

Description: Now that you’ve got a handle on pandas, it’s time to jump into some advanced topics. You know how to import a dataset, but what happens when you load the data and nothing looks right? We’ll walk through cleaning up a dirty dataset with pandas. Then we’ll jump into the fun part: visualizing the data you’ve analyzed with a Python library called matplotlib. This session is good for: People who can load and perform basic summary and grouping functions in pandas.