Data+Narrative: Advanced
  • Type Learning
  • Level Intermediate
  • Time Days
  • Cost Paid

Data+Narrative: Advanced

Issued by Boston University

This digital certification showcases the badge holder's aptitude for telling stories with complex datasets using tools such as SQL and R, including cleaning, analyzing and visualizing voluminous information. This badge acknowledges demonstrated skills and abilities in integrating big data into compelling, impactful narratives to move the needle for audiences in a positive direction.

  • Type Learning
  • Level Intermediate
  • Time Days
  • Cost Paid

Skills

Earning Criteria

  • Finding Data: Badge holders are introduced to basic principles of Data Storytelling and learn core skills.  Earners are able to:  Identify high-value data for storytelling projects, consider best practices for writing with data, identify insights for stories implement new skills and identify a dataset with which to work for a sample project, and have an introduction to statistical program. R.
  • Extracting and Cleaning Data: Badge earners are introduced to basic operations in R, working with regular expressions and cleaning data in R.  Earners are able to:  explain and demonstrate the strengths of R with respect to data access, clean and organize data, explore text data loaded into R by using regular expressions, and  clean and organize data using subsets and variable selections.
  • Analyzing Data: Earners understand components of structured query language (SQL) to explore/analyze data and use statistical methods for assessing data. Earners are able to: import and view data in SQL with the SQLLite Firefox add-on, create queries to perform basic math, build queries to join tables and find potentially hidden, important stories in your data  Build update queries and subqueries to find significant stories in data, and approach data in SQL with the storytelling frame of mind.
  • Visualizing Data: Badge holders know how to create data-driven maps, charts, graphs and understand techniques for using R for visualizations.  They are able to:  create visualizations with Tableau Public, examine data sets to identify outliers using visualization techniques, visualize data using R built-in graphics routines to product scatter plots, bar charts, histograms, correlation plots, box plots and time series plots.
  • Visualizing Data (continued): Badge holders know how to utilize ggplot2 to produce plots, explain the difference between R build-in graphics and ggplot2, and estimate a confidence interval for the location of the distribution underlying a data sample and explain what it means.
  • Data Narrative: Learners are able to demonstrate best practices for presenting a compelling data narrative, including methods for ensuring the accuracy of data, writing with numbers and presenting powerful data stories.  Badge holders are able to: organize complex data into story components, negotiate with team members on most effective storytelling approaches, critique the strength and weaknesses of data-driven stories, and write and present a powerful, data-driven story.