Using Google Sheets to Create, Organize & Explore Your Humanities Data Workshop - Winter Institute in Digital Humanities @ NYCDH2021

This presentation stems from a 2-hour workshop given at the Winter Institute in Digital Humanities at NYC Digital Humanities Week 2021 (February 8–12, 2021). The aim of this workshop was to familiarize novice Google Sheets users, particularly those with qualitative Humanities backgrounds, with various tools to organize and explore their data during the data collection process. 

Full presentation description:

Google Sheets is a web-based spreadsheet program, equivalent in some ways to Microsoft Excel, with a wide array of features and uses. For people who would like to embark on a digital humanities project, it is one of many options for organizing data. This workshop is aimed at total beginners and will introduce a few ways to facilitate automatic data entry, organization, and visualization on Google Sheets. The skills presented in this workshop are suitable for anyone working with spreadsheets, and apply for any project in which there is repeated information (names, places, objects, dates). We will learn to sort and filter data, auto-populate cells, and organize sheets visually. The workshop is in three parts: first, an overview of Google Sheets and potential use cases (e.g., art exhibitions over time, books authored by a publishing house); second, a detailed explanation of some of Google Sheets’ features (Code Tables, Data Validation, Conditional Formatting, VLookup, Column Stats and Filters, and Pivot Tables); and third, a walk-through of these tools using a sample data set. Participants can follow along with the walk-through by using their own data or the sample set provided.

Skill level: Total Beginner
Prerequisites/requirements: Basic familiarity with Google Sheets or Excel. The course will be carried out using Google Sheets. You will be added to a shared sheet using the email address that you provide for the registration, so a Google account is required. Participants can also observe the process without using the Sheets and can use their own data set to practice the skills learned.