What does eating a grub have to do with interviewing children in Costa Rica? What does studying Don Quixote or Shakespeare have to do with examining business transactions, consulting for an NGO or designing a visualization on terrorist incidents?
ANSWER: They all describe ways that Grinnell students are engaging with real-world data.
Well-educated individuals should be able to create, evaluate, and analyze data, so that they can ultimately engage in the most well-informed decision-making. They will then need to be able to effectively communicate patterns in the data to others, using statistics and/or visualization tools in addition to, of course, well-crafted words.
None of these analytic or communicative skills are easy to learn and acquiring expertise demands both theory and the opportunity for practice. In an age of ubiquitous data (much of it of dubious quality) and numerous computer-assisted visualization and analytic tools (all of which can be both used and misused) the pitfalls are many, although the rewards for are great. Employers love the data-savvy, but data analysis is an important part of decision-making in daily life as well!
Grinnell College classes in disciplines ranging from Anthropology to Spanish, History to Biology, Psychology to English, and Political Science to Statistics are engaging with real data in a variety of ways. Some classes include data collection as well as analysis and display; others are more focused on evaluating data, interpreting it and communicating the results.
DASIL’s mission is to assist faculty and students explore the world using data. We are embarking on a series of profiles designed to highlight some of the innovative ways the Grinnell faculty incorporate data in their classes.
See future posts for more details about how grubs, high school students, Don Quixote , and even baboons, all fit into the picture.