Spreadsheets for Humanities

Do you keep information in a spreadsheet, but are never quite sure if you are doing the right thing? This is the class for you!

Researchers in humanities and qualitative social science often end up using spreadsheets, even if they don’t intend to use any statistical methods later on. This could be to keep data about museum objects or archaeological finds, record information from historic documents about people or places, create summaries of interviews or photographs, or re-use records from library catalogues.

In this practical class, we look at some basic principles of how to organise such data in a spreadsheet to improve efficiency and accuracy. We will also look how to share spreadsheets and how to ensure long-term access to your data.

Learning objectives

This session will help you to:

• Understand the principles of ‘Tidy data’
• Organise your material in a data table format
• Deal with some common formatting issues
• Ensure data quality
• Share and back-up your spreadsheet.

Prerequisite

Please have either Excel, Google Sheets or Libre Office available on your computer.

What this course is not

This is not a course on using Excel. Digital Services recommend this course for Excel users.

It is also not a course in statistics or data visualisation.

After the workshop

You may find attending the Cleaning Data in OpenRefine webinar useful.