DATA 311 - Lecture 0 Worksheet

Enter the names of the students at your table:

Work with your table to answer the following questions. To start with, you do not need to devise a perfect definition - listing associated words and phrases is fine. If you’ve finished that and time allows, try to summarize your answer as a defintion.

  1. What is data science? What do data scientists do?

  2. What is data?

  3. Given the following examples of different datasets, what properties might help us categorize different types of data?

Daily temperature records Social media connections (who follows who) A collection of textbooks A course gradebook
Daily sky conditions (cloudy, sunny, foggy, etc.) Browsing history of all users of Google Chrome All youtube videos A database of WWU students
Satellite images of the USA An org chart (who works for who)
  1. Brainstorm at least 3 interesting questions that (a) you’d like to know the answer to, and (b) you think could be answered with data. Ideally, try to consider questions that can be answered with data that is not impossible for you to acquire.