Graduate Carpentries: Python for Social Scientists Workshop

University of Pennsylvania

March 7-8, 2024

10:00 am - 4:00 pm ET

Instructors: Ruben Ramirez Salas, Xinyu Xie, Hao Ye

Helpers: Cynthia Heider, Public Digital Scholarship Librarian, Stephen Hall, Computer Science Librarian, Girmaye Misgna, Mapping and Geospatial Data Librarian, Lauren Phegley, Research Data Manager, Ben Liebersohn, Geospatial and Mapping Fellow, Andy Janco, Research Software Engineer

Registration

Space is limited and we anticipate high demand! Please apply for your spot by Thursday, February 29.

General Information

The Carpentries project comprises the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry communities of Instructors, Trainers, Maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.

Want to learn more and stay engaged with The Carpentries? Carpentries Clippings is The Carpentries' biweekly newsletter, where we share community news, community job postings, and more. Sign up to receive future editions and read our full archive: https://carpentries.org/newsletter/

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners' existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing".

Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

Where: Research Data and Digital Scholarship Exchange, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

When: March 7-8, 2024. Add to your Google Calendar.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).

Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. For workshops at a physical location, the workshop organizers have checked that:

Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.

Hosts:

Contact: Please email libraryrdds@pobox.upenn.edu for more information.


Code of Conduct

Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct. This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.


Collaborative Notes

We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.


Surveys

Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Post-workshop Survey


Schedule

Day 0 - March 06

10:00am - 11:00am Data Cleaning with OpenRefine
3:00pm - 4:00pm Install Python Party

Day 1 - March 07

10:00am - 10:30am Workshop Introduction
10:30am - 12:00pm Introduction to Python, Starting with Data
12:00pm - 1:00pm Python User Group Meeting & Lunch
1:00pm - 3:30pm Indexing, Slicing and Subsetting DataFrames in Python, Data Types and Formats
4:00pm - 7:00pm Penn Alum Data Scientists Panel & Happy Hour

Day 2 - March 08

10:00am - 10:15am Welcome back
10:15am - 12:00pm Data visualisation using Matplotlib
12:00pm - 1:00pm Lunch Break
1:00pm - 3:30pm Data Workflows and Automation, Review, Next Steps
3:30pm - 4:00pm Wrap-up / Q&A

Setup

To participate in a Data Carpentry workshop, you will need access to software as described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.

The setup instructions for the Data Carpentry Social Sciences workshops (with Python) can be found at the workshop overview site.