Data Literacy
A User's Guide
- David Herzog - Missouri School of Journalism, USA
Communication Research Methods | Newswriting/reporting | Research Methods & Evaluation (General)
We are swimming in a world of data, and this handy guide will keep you afloat while you learn to make sense of it all. In Data Literacy: A User's Guide, David Herzog, a journalist with a decade of experience using data analysis to transform information into captivating storytelling, introduces students and professionals to the fundamentals of data literacy, a key skill in today’s world. Assuming the reader has no advanced knowledge of data analysis or statistics, this book shows how to create insight from publicly-available data through exercises using simple Excel functions. Extensively illustrated, step-by-step instructions within a concise, yet comprehensive, reference will help readers identify, obtain, evaluate, clean, analyze and visualize data. A concluding chapter introduces more sophisticated data analysis methods and tools including database managers such as Microsoft Access and MySQL and standalone statistical programs such as SPSS, SAS and R.
Supplements
The open-access Student Study Site includes the following:
- Easy to use data sets for lessons
- "On Your Own"exercises aimed to help students test their data literacy
Great overview of the data process using spreadsheets, which seems reachable for our students.
It is a very useful and easy-to-follow book. I intend to recommend it to my students as a complimentary source to gain an understanding of the context, concepts and main steps for doing data driven journalism.
A very useful book, and I am using it as a supplemental text. The book uses Excel as the analytic tool -- normally a very good choice -- be we are using SPSS in the class. I have recommended the students buy their own copies if they intend to conduct analyses on their own or for their employer in the future, where SPSS may not be available.