Transform your Humanities / Social Sciences Data into a Spreadsheet
If you’re looking at pages of notes and wondering how to pull it all together, a spreadsheet is definitely the way to do it. Creating a spreadsheet is essentially a form of data management – you’re trying to collect, organize, and (eventually) analyze a bunch of information, and your end game is making sense of it all.
A critical part of this process is deciding how to organize the spreadsheet – understanding the functional difference between rows and columns; choosing column names; deciding how to format the data you record in each cell. It’s definitely a trial and error process. With hands-on practice, you’ll get better at making these decisions.
Learn Data Management at Brandeis
Enroll in a two-part Excel workshop. Brandeis’ Data Analysis Specialists will teach you the basics of the software, plus some beginner visualizations (i.e. graphs).
The Data Services Team at Brandeis can help with any Humanities or Social Sciences project, and will support all stages of learning. They can help you find data or learn how to record your own; how to organize and store it; how to analyze it with statistics and other visualizations.
Hands-on Asynchronous Tutorials
Tutorial: Spreadsheet Organization for Social Sciences and Humanities Datasets
For many of us in the Social Sciences and Humanities, transforming human activity into rows and columns can be a challenge. This tutorial can help jumpstart the process. Using a small list of textual sources, you will discover how to envision rows and columns out of the bibliographic information. Next, you learn how to record and organize data in a way that’s useful for answering your research question.