I’m starting this site as an entirely optional supplement for students in the Fall 2022 iteration of “Data & Culture” at Rutgers. After starting the course with a sermon on the importance of figuring out how any given data has been made and what its uses could be, I didn’t want to leave my own examples from class as obscure black boxes. Also, I wanted to provide pointers to datasets we discuss in class together with some notes on them, for students thinking about further investigations.
In order to be explicit about manipulating the datasets, I’ll be showing R code I use for this purpose. Students in the course will eventually learn enough R to follow along, but I don’t expect anyone in the course to figure out the programming part just yet. For the moment, it’s for reference.