Spreadsheets for Humanities

Intended audience

PGRs and staff conducting, or supporting, research in humanities and qualitative social science.

Prerequisite

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

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.

Course overview

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 information about museum objects or archaeological finds, data abstracted from historic documents about people and places, summaries of interviews or photographs, records from library catalogues and so on.

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.

Please note: this is not a course on using Excel. Digital Services recommend this course for Excel users: https://uniofleicester.sharepoint.com/sites/University-Training/SitePages/Excel-take-time-to-learn.aspx

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

Trainer

Dr William Farrell, Library Research Services