Hack Nights

Hack Harris 12 - OpenRefine and Regex

This week at Hack Harris (Wednesday at 6pm in 140B) we’ll be starting with an intro to OpenRefine, previously Google Refine. If you could download and install it before Wednesday, that’d be swell but not mandatory. OpenRefine is a hybrid database and spreadsheet, borrowing parts of each to make tedious data cleaning of big data sets still tedious but slightly less annoying.

We’ll also be exploring the marvelous world of regular expressions, a widespread tool for searching text that can be used in practically any language, as well as in OpenRefine. Inspired by xkcd, we’ll take a look at a great tutorial and then play a few rounds of Regex Golf.

Hack Harris moves to Harris, finally! Wed. 9/3, 6pm, room 140C.

Remember that Hack Harris will be moving to Harris starting tomorrow. We’ll be in room 140C this week, with a start time of 6pm. This should give all you working folk time to get down to Hyde Park from your real person jobs, easing the transition to becoming a student again.

This week we’ll cover mapping in CartoDB. We’ll have three or four data sets picked out from the City of Chicago’s open data portal for you all to play with, hopefully in small groups.

If you know any incoming students — or even if you just see one standing scared in the cafe of Harris, confused and unsure about how to find, well, basically anything in that building — point them to Hack Harris.

Hack Harris potluck on Sept 24 for new students, returning students, and alums!

If you don’t want to think about how summer is ending, ignore this post. But if you like putting things on your calendar weeks in advance, make sure to note the Hack Harris beginning of the school year potluck.

It’ll be on Wednesday (duh), 9/24 in Hyde Park at 6pm. We’ll remind you again in a few weeks. This will be during orientation week and incoming students are invited. Alums, if you dare to return to Hyde Park, we’d very much welcome your beautiful faces, too!

Hack Harris 10 - JavaScript, and alums and friends always welcome!

I think we set a new HaHa attendance record this past week! Thank you to all the Harris alums who joined us to learn SQL from Jonathan. And to repeat (or maybe state for the first time): Alums, friends, and frenemies are very much welcome at all Hack Harris events.

This week we’ll dip our toes into JavaScript. HTML organizes web pages, CSS makes them pretty, and JS makes them interactive. Want to make fun interactive maps like this with open data? Well, you’ll need to know JavaScript. So come get an intro to it this Wednesday @ 5:30 pm at 16 W. Randolph (Argo Tea).

Announcing our new website!

Is the air a bit lighter, is gravity working a little harder, today or is it just me? Who knows, but the best way to deal with summer’s halfway point and the existential dread that comes with it is to be productive at this week’s Hack Harris! Come learn more Python, and if you’re lucky maybe you’ll be there when Sarah coins a new data-related pun :)

Optional things to do before Wednesday:

• [Install IPython Notebook] (http://ipython.org/install.html)
• [Check out some beginner tutorials] (https://wiki.python.org/moin/BeginnersGuide/NonProgrammers)

Upcoming events of interest to Hack Harris and DiPP!

(1) Thursday 8/21, @ 6.30pm: [Quality Storytelling on the Internet with Northwestern’s Knight Lab] (http://www.meetup.com/Data-Science-Chicago/events/197145262/)

(2) Friday and Saturday, 9/19 - 9/20: [Chicago School of Data Days] (http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/projects/chicago-school-of-data/). Register [here] (https://www.eventbrite.com/e/chicago-school-of-data-days-tickets-12167193403?ref=ebtn).

(3) Friday and Saturday, 9/26 - 9/27: UChicago econ dept conference, [Interactions: Bringing Together Econometrics and Applied Microeconomics] (https://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/interactions-bringing-together-econometrics-and-applied-microeconomics)

We hope to see some of you at all of these events!

OpenRefine at Wednesday's Hack Harris!

It was wonderful seeing new faces at last week’s Hack Harris! Welcome to the hippest club in town, folks. And thank you to the HaHa contingent who battled the Lolla crowds to attend the mapping learnathon (masterfully organized by the inimitable and apparently indefatigable Matt Gee) on Saturday.

This week at Hack Harris we’re going to continue on with OpenRefine, which we got a great intro to on Saturday. But worry not if you couldn’t make it this weekend: We’ll be starting over at the very beginning on Wednesday (@ 6pm, the Argo Tea at 16 W. Randolph).

Here’s some stuff to play around with, if you want, before Wednesday:

• [Download OpenRefine] (http://openrefine.org/download.html)
• We’re 100 percent stealing DSSG’s data challenge. We’ll use these data sets on Wednesday.
• Take a look at this intro to the cluster tool in OpenRefine

We’ve still got a lot of summer Hack Harris nights, so let us know if there’s anything you want to learn or work on and we’ll be sure to incorporate that into an upcoming hack night. If there are any events you think would be interesting to HaHa / DiPP, pass those along and we could try to organize a group to go together.

See you Wednesday!

Learn Python and Contribute to the DiPP Website!

Hello lovelies,

(1) This week’s HaHa* is one not to be missed. If Jonathan’s and my presence isn’t enough of a draw, we’ll also be teaching you intro data exploration in Python! We’ll grab a few exercises from this book: http://greenteapress.com/thinkstats/thinkstats.pdf.

To sum: Learn Python at HaHa, Wed. @ 6pm, Argo Tea at 16 W. Randolph

(2) DiPP has a website! Check us out — aren’t we looking pretty? +1,000 to last week’s HaHa attendees for getting it off the ground.

Jonathan and I may write your snarky weekly HaHa updates, but all of YOU are DiPP. So show your DiPP love and devotion by helping to build the website. It’s built with Jekyll and Poole on GitHub: https://github.com/uc-dipp/uc-dipp.github.io

If that means nothing to you, fear not. Just sign up for a free GitHub account, shoot me or Jonathan your username, and we’ll add you to the project and give you some pointers on how to get started. If you can Google “how to change font colors in HTML,” you can contribute.

(3) DiPP has a Twitter: http://twitter.com/uchicagodipp Recently this thing called “my paying job” has gotten in the way of maintaining it as well I’d like, so please send me links!

(4) If you’ve read this far, thanks so much. As your reward, here’s a cute animal curated personally for you by the greatest cute-animals-on-the-Internet curator of all, Adriana Ciccone: http://i.imgur.com/mC2nvAH.jpg

Thanks and see you Wednesday,

Jonathan and Lara

* For those who don’t read all their emails super closely, HaHa is the accepted alternative name for Hack Harris. All thanks go to Sarah Sajewski for the coining.

Help us make our website!

All of YOU are DiPP. So show your DiPP love and devotion by helping to build the website. It’s built with Jekyll and Poole on GitHub.

If that means nothing to you, fear not. Just sign up for a free GitHub account, shoot us your username, and we’ll add you to the project and give you some pointers on how to get started. If you can Google “how to change font colors in HTML,” you can contribute.

Announcing our new website!

Beyonce updates and Hack Harris

(1) Via Adriana, a mesmerizing data visualization of a random NYC taxicab’s day: http://nyctaxi.herokuapp.com/ The underlying data was FOIL’d (NY state version of FOIA) and is here: http://chriswhong.com/open-data/foil_nyc_taxi/

(2) You all apparently love shortcuts. So in the interest of being service-y, Jonathan will dish out more of what you love tomorrow at Hack Harris. If there’s interest, he will also dive into git and get everyone set up on github and we’ll talk about using the terminal.

(3) Here’s a secret. All the cool kids refer to Hack Harris as HaHa. If you want to be a cool kid, I suggest that you begin doing the same.

Thanks, Lara and Jonathan

Hack Harris 7.23 v4 final FINAL

Have you heard this new buzzword “collaboration”? What does it mean? And what is “version control”? Is that like when I save my document under a different name every time I make an edit? And THEN does your computer always crash when using tracked changes in Word? I know mine does. Then I have to go back to version 1 and start over. (That’s why I pasted a picture of a cute rabbit into version 1, to give me the strength to keep going.)

Some people are talking about a website that lets you work on documents with others without worrying about version control – even work AT THE SAME TIME. And you always have old versions of all files so you can’t accidentally overwrite last year’s budget. It’s also rumored to give +100,000 hacker points. Can this be real?

Also, why doesn’t Hack Harris have a website? Can we fix this? Together?

Bring your laptops. See you Wednesday!

Yours in collaboration,

HaHa LateX

Hello lovelies,

Please don’t get blown away by the wind tonight… so that you’ll be able to come to Hack Harris this Wednesday @ 6pm. Last week some ne’er-do-wells destroyed my old econometrics problem sets as we learned LaTeX. We also talked DIPP logo and branding (thanks for attending, Andi!).

Participation in planned activities is optional, but, this week I’ve had requests to go over IPython notebook and Excel. So you can hear me chatter about those two things or bring your own work.

Hope to see you this week! As always, any questions, comments or suggestions should go to jgiuffrida@uchicago.edu or larakattan@uchicago.edu

Lara and Jonathan