Easy tools for acquiring, processing and exploring data
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Acquiring data
Introduction to web scraping (quite advanced, but contains a section on a user interface tool as well)
Hand-written text transcription: Transkribus
Layout and text transcription: OCR4all
Keyword generation from text: Annif
Twitter archiving: TAGS
Data processing
Further resources
OpenRefine for Social Science Data Data Carpentry tutorial, not really for social science but for general cleaning up of data
Further tutorials:
http://j.mp/dhh15ho (includes section on extension)
http://freeyourmetadata.org/reconciliation/ (on reconciliation)
Data exploration
Visualisation
Visualisation is the act of taking data and transforming it into visual shapes and forms. The reasoning behind this is that humans are very good at processing visual information, with a lot of the necessary shape and anomaly detection and comparison processes even happening subconsciously.
Most visualisation is explanatory. https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/
Book: Information visualization : perception for design, particularly chapter 5 for pre-attentive processing and 6 for the gestalt laws.
http://socviz.co/lookatdata.html section 1.5
Resources
Flowchart on selecting a good visualization based on what you want to show
An example of four ways to visualise the same data and how that affects what you can read from it
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