Lab 3 - Data and Metadata

Why Spreadsheets?

Today we’ll be looking at a few spreadsheets. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it—looking at spreadsheets? But this is the form in which we often encounter historical or literary data, and it’s worth spending some time just thinking about what kinds of questions we might ask of tabular data, and what skills we might need to answer those questions.

The Data

• 1840 Census (also check out this same dataset at WTFcsv)
• Nineteenth-Century Whaling Crews
• Viral Texts Reprinting Data

Other Tools Worth Checking Out

• WTFcsv
• Raw Graphs
• Breve
• Flourish
• Tableau
• XLMiner Analysis Toolkit