Structure of the course

- [Instructor] I'm going to talk a little about the structure of the course. I am so excited to be presenting this course. Data curation seems to be a hot topic now, but to be honest, it's actually an old topic, so I've been doing it for years. But, it's trending now, and I think I know why. The purpose of data curation is to help people have a better understanding of their data. And now that we have big data, we got more data, more problems. That why I think people are looking to data curation more now. If you are used to working on data projects, you are already familiar with some data curation. You might have documentation for your database, I call it doco for short because I'm too lazy to say the whole word. Also, I'm sure you have spec sheets and requirement lists lying around. Those are curation files too, but there are other special unique individual files, you can make yourself, that are just about the data and only intended to help people working on the data understand it. Those files will be the focus of this course. I've been teaching data curation for about 15 years. I teach my students the different curation files you can make, and actually they aren't that hard. If you are like my students, you'll learn them quickly. However, the problem comes at the end. My student will be presented with a real world problem and they will get all mixed up. They won't be able to remember the difference between all the files I just taught them, and which one to use for what. So, I designed this course knowing about this issue, and trying to solve it in the design. First, I'm going to show you how I try to prevent confusion in the way I arranged this course. First, you'll see that I have an Introduction Only chapter, which is Chapter One. I call it Introduction Only because all it does is describe the five categories of curation files we are going to cover. That way you can at least keep them sorted out by category. Then at the end, I have an Application Only chapter, which is Chapter Seven. In this chapter, again, I go over the five categories of curation we went over in the course, and reflect upon the different files included in that category. Hopefully by giving you a strong foundation in Chapter One, and then circling back to the same categories in Chapter Seven, I'll be able to prevent you from getting confused between all these curation files I'm going to teach you how to make. All right, now let me quickly summarize the five categories of curation files we're going to go over in chapters two through six. We will start out with Chapter Two, which covers back-end curation, and Chapter Three, which covers front-end curation. But when we get to chapters two and three I promise I will explain what a back-end and front-end really are. And actually, they are very different things, so they require very different kinds of curation. Because back-end and front-end curation are used all the time in database projects, that's why I covered these two topics first in the course. Next in Chapter Four, I will focus on survey curation For surveys you still need back-end and front-end curation, but you need some special extra curation files to help you keep track of certain important points that will impact the analysis of the survey data later. And, I'll show you how to make those. Then in Chapter Five, I show you how to make flow diagrams. These are only needed in certain situations. Situations where you want to map the root of something. Something like work, or data, or users, or even something else. Depending on what you are mapping, you make a different flow diagram and I'll show you how to do that. Finally in Chapter Six, we cover the last category of curation, which I termed Text-Based Curation Files. But, I really am referring to kind of a grab bag of all the other types of curation files that I tried to include with a data project. And most of these are in the form of text-based files, letters, agreements, legal opinions, you'll see when you get to Chapter Six. I'll not only explain which of these files you want to keep, but also the rational for including them in your curation. So in summary, the order will go like this. In Chapter One, I'll introduce all five categories to you. And in chapters two through six I'll explain each category. Then, I'll circle back in Chapter Seven to go over each category again to help you remember how to keep all these files sorted in your mind. That's my secret plan for keeping you unconfused. Although, it's not very secret, since I just said it out loud on tape, oh well. Finally, I just want to thank you for taking this course. I think you will find that it stimulates your more artistic side, which can be a nice break from working directly with the data constantly. And, I really how you learn at least one thing in this course that you can apply into your work, enjoy!