This week I had the opportunity to hear a lecture from Deena Engle and Vicky Steeves about open data. They covered many topics ranging from the challenges of using proprietary data, cleaning data, and popular tools used to handle data. In the past, I have never worked with open data or with any sort of data handling platform, so this talk was a great way to learn more about the field.

One thing I learned from the lecture was that there is a great deal of open data as available on the internet. Furthermore, I was able to learn about the various sites that could be useful when looking for data sets. During the lecture, we also were given an overview about how to find data useful for our own research purposes. I thought a lot of the advice was extremely useful and could be relevant when we start looking at open source projects.

It was also really interesting to learn about the benefits of using a data software over a spreadsheet. I had always assumed that using SQL, for example, would be better than using Excel. However, hearing horror stories from the guest lectures really made me understand the different between the two.