Who's Afraid of the Big (Bad) Data?
This presentation was part of a webinar series for the Youth Delegate Program, a one-year fellowship program for young actors of international development from all around the world. It served as an introduction to the know-hows of data science: where to find data, how to collect data on your own project or organization, and how (not) to use it to guide decisions and evaluate the impact of interventions.
1. What is data?
- Spreadsheets, but not only…
- Qualitative and quantitative data
2. A Data Hiker’s Guide
- The skill set
- The tool set
3. Letting the data speak: Visualisation
- Why visualise?
- How to visualise?
= Some visualisation caveats
4. Making the data sing: Analysis
- Beyond description: prediction and causality
- The role of theory
5. Don’t fall for the sirens’ song!
- Spurious relationships
- Researcher bias
6. Where is data?
- Internal data
- The N.E.R.D. framework: Needs, Encryption, Routines, Deletion
- Finding external data
