The Urban Big Data Centre at the University of Glasgow is pleased to announce the return of our SASNet data skills training programme for summer 2017.

The programme will run from 1st August - 6th September offering an opportunity for skills development in key areas of data analytics, methods, and data management. Please visit http://ubdc.ac.uk/outreach-plus-training/sasnet/summer-training-2017 to view the full selection of courses.

Please contact keith.maynard@glasgow.ac.uk with any enquiries about the training programme.

Getting started with Data Management

Course instructor: Marta Nicholson and Mirjam Allik, UBDC, University of Glasgow

Course duration: half day (Tuesday 29th August 2017, 10:00am – 1:00pm)

Course location: Jura teaching lab, Level 4 Annexe, Glasgow University Library

Audience: Social scientists, students and practitioners - anyone with responsibility for producing and managing datasets

Fees: £25 - For UK registered students
£35 - For staff at UK academic institutions, Research Council UK funded researchers, UK public sector staff and staff at UK registered charity organisations
£50 - For all other participants

Pre-requisite knowledge: Prior experience of using R would be useful but is not essential

Course summary:

This course is designed to guide those with limited or no experience of using data-supported research methods through the fundamental processes from acquiring data through to best practices in data management.

In order to maximise the potential from your datasets it is important that care is taken to prepare and organise data to ensure accuracy, efficiency and accordance with usage terms. Course participants will gain a clear understanding of the main sharing and access issues and the most appropriate platforms and conventions to choose for storing and structuring data. The course will provide time to try out practical exercises of data management in R using a variety of example datasets from UBDC's open data collection and other sources to demonstrate the different issues and techniques being taught. These data may include: aggregate health data from ISD, Scottish Census data, SIMD and other Scottish Government open data.

A separate course will run in the afternoon ”Beyond Excel”: PostgreSQL for Data Management that you can register for here. Those attending will learn more about working with databases on a larger scale using PostgreSQL including: data loading, linkage, queries and producing various outputs.

Course content:

Part 1 - Sourcing data, best data management practice and understanding licencing

- How to find and where to get data to facilitate its resolution (e.g. UBDC / open data repositories / apis / Google!)

- How to approach the practical challenges of obtaining data:

• Where to put it (e.g. formats, database platforms, folder structure)
• Legal issues – types of data licenses and associated restrictions
• How to manage it (naming conventions, versioning, understanding metadata)
• Use of digital tools to record annotations about data

Part 2 - Preparing data for analysis

• Removing extraneous text and symbols from data
• Restructuring and aggregating datasets
• Merging data
• Cleaning datasets from metadata and compiling metadata

Related 2017 courses:

”Beyond Excel”: PostgreSQL for Data Management

Payment and registration:

Lunch will be provided in the break room adjacent to the IT lab - please specify any dietary or access requirements when registering.

Payment by card preferred.

If you are unable to pay by debit or credit card we are able to accept payment by invoice. Please supply the following information by e-mail to keith.maynard@glasgow.ac.uk within 14 days of registering on Eventbrite in order to confirm your place on the course:

• Contact name for invoice
• Purchase Order number (note that the supplier is University of Glasgow)
• Contact e-mail address for payment correspondence
• Full name of organisation/department
• VAT registration (if applicable)
• Currency
• Address for Invoice to be sent and telephone number

To cancel your place and request a refund, please email keith.maynard@glasgow.ac.uk. Please note that a refund of course fees less 10% administrative charge can only be issued if you cancel your place in writing at least 7 days prior to the course after which time fees will be non-refundable. Substitutes can be made at no extra charge up until 5pm on the last working day before the course.

Related 2017 courses:

Introduction to R

”Beyond Excel”: PostgreSQL for Data Management