The life-changing magic of tidying up your data: The art and science of making data organized and useable

Join MEASURE Evaluation for a webinar sharing tips on data structure for geographic and other types of information. The one-hour webinar will take place August 24 at 9:30am EDT and will be led by John Spencer, MEASURE Evaluation’s senior geographic information systems (GIS) technical specialist.

Have you ever sat down with a dataset eager to start analyzing it, only to find that you can’t because the data is structured in an unusual way or there are other problems, such as the way variables are named or null values are recorded?

If so, you’ve encountered untidy data. Untidy data is a mess. The variable names are weird; observations are stored in columns when they should be in rows; time series data is recorded so that it’s difficult to calculate elapsed time. Bottom line: When data is untidy, a separate effort will likely be required before you can use it for any analysis.

As the world produces more data, it also produces more untidy data. In global health, untidy data is a problem that can undermine the effectiveness of even the strongest health information system and introduce a barrier to effective data use. But it is usually possible to turn messy data into tidy data.

Anyone who uses data will at some point need to tidy up their data. This webinar will cover the fundamental requirements of tidy data and how to ensure data you produce is tidy. It will also present a list of tools and techniques for making messy data tidy.

Register to attend the webinar.

Presenter Bio
John Spencer is senior GIS technical specialist for the MEASURE Evaluation project, based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development. John is trained as a geographer and has used geographic information systems extensively since 1995.  He has had a great deal of experience making “messy” data tidy.