Data Manipulation

This course aims to help students get started with their own data harvesting, processing, and aggregation. Data analysis is crucial to evaluating and designing solutions and applications, as well as understanding user's information needs and use. In many cases the data we need to access is distributed online among many webpages, stored in a database, or available in a large text file. Often these data (e.g. web server logs) are too large to obtain and/or process manually. Instead, we need an automated way of gathering the data, parsing it, and summarizing it, before we can do more advanced analysis. In this course students will learn to use Perl and its modules to accomplish these tasks in a 'quick and easy' yet useful and repeatable way. The companion half semester course on Exploratory Data Analysis will then teach the students how to further glean insights from the data through analysis and visualization.