Over the past few weeks, students have been learning how to iterate through items – whether they may be in strings, lists, tuples, or dictionaries. Students have mainly been using for loops to grab the value of each item, and lots of progress has been in regards to writing them with little to no instruction. […]
Python Open Lab: Week 4
On March 5, we built on the lesson from week 3, and reviewed functions. Here is one of the problems you can try: The full jupyter notebook is available for this lesson. Please comment, or send us an email and we can make this lesson (or any other lesson from the semester) available to you! […]
Spring 2018 R Open Lab: Character Strings
Feb 28 For this week, the topic we discussed is character strings in R. This lab’s content is a steppingstone for text analysis. We started with introducing the concept of characters, character strings, and character string vectors in R. Then, we talked about operations on strings such as getting substring and combining different character strings. […]
Python Open Lab Week 3: Feb 26
For week three we decided to tackle strings, string methods, and functions: String Methods Strings are amongst the most popular types in Python. We can create them simply by enclosing characters in quotes. Python treats single quotes the same as double quotes. Creating strings is as simple as assigning a value to a variable. The […]
Spring 2018 R Open Lab: More Fundamentals
Last week, we walked through the R starter kit which introduced most of the useful basic concepts in R such as vectors, matrices, and loops. This week, we continued to talk about more basics in R and demonstrated examples. The goal of this lab is to get attendants a better understanding of how R language […]
Python Open Lab Feb 19
On week two of the open labs, we continued building on the starter kit and worked on python data structures. We discussed loops (both for and while), dictionaries and dictionary methods. A while loop is a concept that, when implemented, executes a piece of code over and over again, while a given condition remains true: […]
Columbia Libraries Launches Website for the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ)
Columbia Libraries is very pleased to announce the launch of the website for the digitized data of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry. An accompanying guide to the use of the digitized materials with many supplementary materials is also available. The LCAAJ archive is an extraordinary resource for research in Yiddish studies that […]
Highlights from the Data Collection: U.S. Election Data
The Libraries Numeric Data Catalog Holdings has some interesting data on the United States election results starting from 1912 to the most recent election year. Included are data on not only the presidential elections, but also gubernatorial, senatorial, congressional, and special senatorial elections. The source of the data is Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential […]
Beat the craze of finals with the Libraries!
Take a study break – you’ve earned one! Join the Libraries and our campus partners for stress-relieving activities over reading week and through final exams. Here’s what’s happening: […]
Python Open Lab Nov 28: Blog Style!
Hello all, Due to some complex scheduling issues, I am posting here the material we would have covered in lab tomorrow. Please feel free to contact me for any questions (data@library.columbia.edu). Enjoy! Python Objects and Classes (cont’d!) Self: What is the self variable in Python? The self variable represents the instance of the object itself. Unlike most object-oriented languages […]