Group project

Preparation

Learning Objectives

• Develop a concept for a group project
• Think about data sources and how to access them

In order to guide the development of ideas for the group exercise, a number of questions are outlined below. In answering these you may be able to develop a concept for a group project that is achievable and of interest to several participants on the workshop.

Data source

The first part of the task is to “find at least one data set relevant to your research”. Spend some time thinking about answers to the following questions in order to develop ideas for possible group projects.

1. What kinds of data are relevant to your research?
2. Are these kinds of data available?
3. Is the data freely available online?
4. What format is the data delivered in?

Ideally, your data source will be freely available from a web page and downloadable in a file format that can be read using common tools. Examples include comma separated variable files (.csv) or netCDF files (.nc). Sometimes files are provided in subject specific formats. This is often not a major problem, especially if the format is defined or if parsing software is provided, but beware of unreadable data formats.

If the data is available from a webpage with a unique URL for each data file, the python urllib module can be used to download the data. Other data sources may be more difficult to download. Ask your instructors or helpers for advice.

Relevant analysis

The next step is to think about the “relevant analysis” that you want to undertake. Ideally you should have an interesting question in mind alongside a visualisation that may answer the question. A key step at the start of the group project is to define the steps needs to undertake this analysis. At this stage, you need a clear idea of what the end result should look like and how much effort will be needed to implement the analysis.

One thing to note is that it is quite common for estimates of the amount of time needed for a software project to be very different from the actual amount of time needed. There is a large literature on this subject.

User interaction

The final thing to think about is what kind of user interaction will be required. This can be quite simple (selecting different data to analyse) or could involve more detailed interaction with graphs that update in real time.

We will spend some time on the second day of the workshop collecting answers to these questions, so you can decide which project you want to work on.