#100DaysOfCode in Python Transcripts
Chapter: Days 37-39: Using CSV data
Lecture: Some amazing data sets
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Let's talk about our data sets real quickly.
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You're probably familiar with CSV data,
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but just in case you're not, it looks like this.
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It's a plain text file and there's a set of headers
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across the top that tell you what each column is.
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So here we can see we've got data,
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an actual mean temperature, an actual minimum temperature,
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and an actual maximum temperature.
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And then we have a bunch of columns
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that correspond to that data.
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Now I told you we're going to work with
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some interesting data sets and it's true,
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I found a good collection here for us to play with.
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Now you may be familiar with a place called FiveThirtyEight.
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It's like a data-driven journalistic news site
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where they gather up a bunch of data
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and they use it to write articles
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and do investigative journalism type things.
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And it turns out every article they have,
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the data that they use to derive those conclusions
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is available online on GitHub, so that's pretty awesome.
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So over at github.com/fivethirtyeight/data,
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that is where we're going to be working
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for the next three days.
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All right, so let's jump over to my web browser here
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and we'll just have a quick look through all the data.
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I told you there's a lot,
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look at the size of that scroll bar.
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There's a ton of options here.
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So let's skip down past all the folders
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and just go to this section.
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So here you can see all of the articles
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written by FiveThirtyEight and then
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the corresponding data that goes with it.
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So let's just grab one here, American Chess is Great Again,
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and if we come back, click on it and you can see
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here's the actual article that they wrote about,
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and you can see here's the graphs
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that they drew based on the data and so on.
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But here is the actual data, so you can come over here
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and it actually describes what it is and so on.
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If you click on it, you can see here's all the data
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that they were using to make these conclusions.
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So what we're going to do in this section of the course
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is we're going to take one set of CSV files
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and use that for our demos
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and ask and answer interesting questions.
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And then for the next three days afterwards,
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you'll be turned loose to build
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your own investigative journalism app.
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You'll choose one of these CSV files
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and come up with a set of questions,
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and it's going to be a ton of fun
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so I hope you're ready to get started on that.
