Overview

The purposes of today's session are to:

1. Provide a few minutes of feedback concerning the Greenfield assignment

2. Complete our discussion of issues relating to data

3. Begin a discussion of graphical presentation of data, including,

A. Tables

B. Figures

*univariate data

*relational data

*multivariate data

A. An important activity conducted in labs is Quality Assurance / Quality Control (QA/QC). Each lab should follow a set of standards to provide confidence in the data. See example 1, example 2, example 3.

B. Data are often described by metadata. Information that describes individual categories of data. Generating good metadata will be important for efforts to put data on-line, as metadata provides a basis for searching data among various databases. See example. See also this page.

C. Data are often proprietary, and subject to restrictions concerning intellectual property rights.

D. Exchange and analysis of data in an on-line environment is termed informatics. Data-mining and meta-analyses will be activities that many people will pursue in the future.

II. Graphical Presentation of Data

Premise: Humans need to make sense out of information. Raw numbers are typically difficult to grasp. Therefore, methods for depicting data in a way that is psychologically easier to understand is an important endeavor for those working in technical fields.

**Data depiction using tables - Still in form of numbers; discuss importance of rows and colums

**Data depiction using figures

A. Charting univariate data

1. Bar charts

2. Pie charts

B. Charting relational data

1. Line graphs

2. Scatterplots

3. Regression diagrams

4. Time series analysis

5. Topographic analyses

C. Charting multivariate data

1. Star diagrams

2. Face diagrams

This page posted and maintained by Kenneth M. Klemow, Ph.D., Biology Department, Wilkes University, Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766. (570) 408-4758, kklemow@wilkes.edu.