Prior to the talk by guest speakers Deena Engel and Vicky Steeves, I had never heard of open data. I was intrigued to learn about it and what it had to do with open source. They explained that open data is data that was free to use and republish just as open software is. They also went on to talk about the ways open data can be used and best practices when using open data. Their explanations were clear and understandable which made me enjoy the talk a lot.

Their lecture kind of took me by surprise in that I was actually much more interested in the topic than I thought I would be. I never thought I was interested in analyzing data mostly because I’ve only ever been focused on computer science. I’ve known that I wanted to pursue computer science, and specifically software engineering, ever since my freshman year of high school so I ignored a lot of things that were not that. This included data science and a bunch of things involving data. It’s tangentially related to computer science, but it was a world I didn’t know and frankly, didn’t care to know more about. Their talk opened my mind a bit about other areas of study. The parts of their lecture that involved computer science weren’t even the parts that I was most intrigued by. I was actually most interested in the conclusions one can draw from analyzing data. It seemed so cool to be able to take a bunch of data and say that it showed something.

Though I now have a newfound interest in using data, I’m not sure I’ll continue looking into it. I certainly won’t be changing my major because of it, but if I ever hear the words “data”, “data science”, “big data”, etc, I won’t be as averse to it!

One thing that I disliked about the lecture was that it didn’t really give me motivation behind using open data in the class. I understand that open data is related to open source because it is free to use, but I couldn’t really see myself contributing to something that uses open data. This is mostly because using data seems complex and there doesn’t seem to be much you can add to open data sets. Perhaps this seems confusing because of my inexperience with working with data and so the talk isn’t really aimed at me.

Regardless, I enjoyed getting to know the two speakers and learning about open data. The subject matter was interesting and I hope to learn more about it another time. Both speakers mentioned coming in again for another guest lecture so I’m looking forward to hearing from them again!