Intro to Data Analysis with Python (In Person)

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Taught by Jonathan Soma

Soma was born in the South, is what someone from the North would say. He co-founded the Brainery, is the sciencey half of Masters of Social Gastronomy, and plans on getting married to Waffle House. In his more droll moments he is a tragic sellout to higher ed as a professor of data journalism at Columbia University's journalism school.

See more @dangerscarf

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The Brainery isn't typically the place for fancy-pants professional development, but co-founder Jonathan Soma is coming home to roost with his most buttoned-up class in years! 

Do you spend your time cranking through spreadsheets at work, VLOOKUPing the days away, idly wishing Excel would stop thinking everything is a date? Are your social media feeds full of "become a data scientist in 12 weeks!" scams that you just can't help but feel a little guilty curiosity about? Or maybe you have some sort of self-improvement/education budget to burn before the end of the year (lucky you!), and you'd love to use it on something slightly less extroverted than Improv For Public Speaking?

Let's learn how to replace your beloved spreadsheet software with our good friend Python (the programming language, not the snake) and the popular tool pandas (again, not the animal). We'll tackle basic data processing, merging multiple databases, cleaning hand-entered data, making projections, building dashboards and visualizations, and more! 

Why is this better than awful, useless internet tutorials, or "10 steps to become a machine learning specialist" YouTube videos? Let me outline the ways:

  • You know it will be fun because Soma wrote a basic Python tutorial that has confetti in it: http://littlecolumns.com/learn/python
  • You know it will be useful because Soma has videos about things like analyzing K-Pop idols, which is clearly very applicable to your daily work 
  • You know it will be technical because over 60k people have watched this awful video of his titled How to solve S3 CORS file error with "Access-Control-Allow-Origin" header block

No prior experience with data, programming things, or computer-y things necessary! Soma has been teaching journalists to code at Columbia for the past 8 years, so you can rest assured that he truly means this. You'll need a laptop for class, but either Windows or Mac is fine. 

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