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The Data Wrangler's Handbook
Simple Tools for Powerful Results
Kyle Banerjee
American Library Association, 2019

Data manipulation and analysis are far easier than you might imagine—in fact, using tools that come standard with your desktop computer, you can learn how to extract, manipulate, and analyze data (and metadata) of any size and complexity. In this handbook, data wizard Banerjee will familiarize you with easily digestible but powerful concepts that will enable you to feel confident working with data. With his expert guidance, you’ll learn how to

  • use a single-word command to sort files of any size by any criteria, identify duplicates, and perform numerous other common library tasks;
  • understand data formats, delimited text and CSV files, XML, JSON, scripting, and other key components of data;
  • undertake more sophisticated tasks such as comparing files, converting data from one format to another, reformatting values, combining data from multiple files, and communicating with APIs (Application Programming Interfaces);
  • save time and stress through simple techniques for transforming text, recognizing symbols that perform important tasks, a Regular Expression cheat sheet, a glossary, and other tools.

Library technologists and those involved in maintaining and analyzing data and metadata will find Banerjee’s resource essential.

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front cover of Database Aesthetics
Database Aesthetics
Art in the Age of Information Overflow
Victoria Vesna
University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.

Contributors: Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.

Victoria Vesna is a media artist, and professor and chair of the Department of Design and Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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