Eighth Post – October 30th

I submitted my mid-semester progress report early this week, which I completed and submitted without any issues. I was also able to attend the class meeting on Wednesday, Oct 28, during which I discussed with the professor on the recent changes in my project plan and subsequent work I’ve done with the datasets. I mentioned that I had to contact a researcher from the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Northeast Fisheries Science Center for assistance with obtaining access to the new datasets, as well as the difficulties I’ve had with opening the two large datasets in an analyzing software (Excel, Google Sheets, etc). Professor Davis asked me to email him my datasets to see if he could try figuring out a way to open them for analysis, unfortunately the two large datasets were too large to even be sent using Outlook, so I instead sent a link to the download page, where the files can be downloaded as a ZIP folder and extracted to yield the CSV files. After the class meeting, one of my classmates, Shaelyn, recommended to me that I possibly try opening the data files using Tableau (which we downloaded for our DSC201 class), which is an idea that I hadn’t even thought of. I haven’t attempted it yet, but I was very appreciative of Shaelyn’s assistance, and early next week, I’m planning to work on trying to open the files in Tableau. If that is unsuccessful, I’ve also considered possibly using R or Python to access the data without needing to open the file (which I should be able to do, since I can access the data in a text editor and therefore can identify the column labels and attributes).