Data and Databases Summer Course

A Columbia University Lede Program presented in Summer 2015.

Consideration of both the scientific and social implications of counting, of turning the world into bits. Through the process of gaining fluency in the use of Python, students will spend some time thinking through representations of core "data types" like time, location, text, image, sound and relationships (or networks), and the computational "affordances" associated with each. Students will study several common metaphors for organizing and storing data – from structureless key-value stores, to document collections like MongoDB, to a single table or spreadsheet, to the "multiple tables" of a relational database. We will also discuss ideas behind publishing or sharing data, moving from HTML documents and Web 1.0 to data services and APIs in Web 2.0, to semantics in Web 3.0. These efforts will be project-driven, with students using and building modern data services with a scripting language. Their projects will underscore the reality that data are plentiful and circulate and interact in a kind of informational ecosystem. As researchers, our students will be called on both to access and to publish data products.