Data skills

Self-training resources for improving skills in processing and managing data.

Data Skills Framework


The Data Skills Framework breaks down the complex landscape of data skills into the sets of skills required by different people in an organisation. It illustrates how technical data skills must be balanced with skills that enable data innovation.

Open Data Maturity Model


The Open Data Maturity Model is a way to assess how well an organisation publishes and consumes open data, and identifies actions for improvement.

Web scraping and Covid-19


A collection of seven videos that provide an introduction to web scraping techniques for collecting data of interest to social scientists. The value, logic and process of capturing data stored on the web are described in detail, and practical examples and exercises are demonstrated using the Python programming language. The videos are presented by Dr Diarmuid McDonnell from the University of the West of Scotland.

Text Data Workshop


This resource is broken down into three videos. Each video has a Jupyter notebook to accompany it and is aimed at programming novices. The first video is a very brief intro to Python that covers the parts of the language one needs to know to scrape and analyse text data, the second video covers how to build a basic web scraper and save textual data into a file, and the third video covers some very basic textual data analysis, i.e. bi-grams. The videos are presented by Dr Lewys Brace from the University of Exeter.

Introduction to Machine Learning


Machine Learning has made its way to the hearts of many modern technologies and services. It has been developed as a computational extension of statistics and might seem like a black box that eats data and provides predictions, but there is more to it. This training session by KCL offers an introduction to Machine Learning, taking a look at its definition, its history and what it has evolved into. The webinar covers: Machine learning in a nutshell, Supervised vs. unsupervised learning, Regression, Classification, Clustering, Dimensionality Reduction, Deep Learning Basics.

Natural language processing – what’s behind the hype?


In their everyday life many people interact with Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools very regularly. Be it a quick look up on Google Translate, asking Siri the way to the next restaurant or the use of spam filters for email inboxes – NLP is not only a popular research field but has found various applications in everyday life. This talk gives an introduction to NLP and provides an overview of commonly used tools and methods. Moreover, it discusses some recent developments in the field. No preliminary knowledge is required. The webinar covers: NLP in everyday life, Artificial intelligence & Neural Networks, NLP Basics, and Popular NLP topics.