Adding Data Movie Script

TinkerPlots comes with a variety of data sets ready to explore. But what do you do when you have your own data you want to analyze? In this movie, you'll learn how to enter new data into TinkerPlots.

Suppose we're doing a school project to find how heavy students’ backpacks are. We've set up a weigh station in the hallway and are collecting information from students as they walk by. To record the data, we'll pull out a stack of data cards.

The first student we stop is Jena. Let's double click the new attribute cell and type in the first attribute "Name." We enter "Jena" right next to it by clicking in the cell, typing her name, and then pressing return. Let's also enter her gender.

We put her backpack on the scale and it weighs 14 pounds. Our unit of weight is pounds, so let's enter pounds in the unit column.

The next student we stop is Greg. To enter his data, we go to a new data card by clicking on the right arrow up here.

This will be case 2. Notice that all the attribute names are already here, so all we have to do is enter Greg’s values.

When entering a lot of data, it's often easier to enter them into a case table. Pull a case table into the document. The case table lists attribute names along the top and each case, or student, in a row.

The next student we stop is Jose. We enter his information in this row.

Let’s pull out a graph to see what we’ve got so far. Here are the 3 students we’ve collected information from. Let's separate them by packweight and by gender. Notice that we have three different values for Gender. We’ve used both “male” and “m” to stand for males. Let’s click on this case, go to the data card. and change the “male” to an “m.” When I redrag the attribute name to the axis, the male label disappears.

Now let's create a new document and see how to enter data from a spreadsheet or word processor. Suppose you have data in a Microsoft Excel file that students from Kennedy Middle School sent you. Along the top row they've got attribute names. Each row beneath it contains information about one case or student. TinkerPlots needs data to be organized in this way.

To get data into TinkerPlots, select everything in the spreadsheet, and copy it. Switch to TinkerPlots. Pull out a stack of data cards. From the Edit menu, choose Paste Cases.

Look over the data to make sure they're organized as you expect. Bodyweight should be showing a continuous color gradient in the color bar because it’s a numeric attribute just like Packweight. But it doesn’t. What’s going on?

Let's open a case table to look at the data. As we scroll down the values of BodyWeight, notice the asterisk here. This indicates a missing value. TinkerPlots expects a blank cell for missing values. So let’s delete it. Notice now over in the data card that the color bar for Bodyweight is a color gradient, indicating that it’s a numeric attribute as we expect.

Finally, let's make another new document and see how to get data from the web into TinkerPlots. Switching to our web browser, we could go to an interesting website called DASL that has a lot of data.

Let's go to DataSubjects, Environment, and Air pollution. Here are data on the pollution levels in 41 cities. Again, they’re organized with the attribute names along the top, and cases in rows.

The fastest way to get data from the web into TinkerPlots is to drag the URL from this page into an empty TinkerPlots document. TinkerPlots puts the data on the webpage automatically into a data card. Again, you should look over the data to make sure they appear as you expect. Sometimes you'll have to do some repair work.

To get more information about entering or downloading data, go to the Help Menu, and open TinkerPlots Help.