A Data Expedition is an element of a course that introduces students to exploratory data analysis.
Pairs of students, often from different disciplines, work with the course instructor to formulate a question that will engage the students, and a pathway through a dataset that will provide insight.
Students are compensated for their participation once their project is completed. Browse our current projects to find opportunities.
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Data Expeditions Projects
In ecology and watershed sciences, large datasets often come from a variety of sources like continuous automated sensors, water grab samples, and community-collected scientific data. Overcoming these challenges is critical to explore the prevalence, persistence, and impact of degraded water quality on human society and wildlife. This project exposes students...
This data expedition focused on the mechanisms animals use to orient using environmental stimuli, the methods that scientists use to test hypotheses about orientation, and the statistical methods used with circular orientation data. Students collected their own data set during the class period, performed hypothesis testing on their data using...
Exposure to local pathogens is a significant selective pressure on the human genome: the strongest selective forces identified in modern human populations are for mutations that confer increased resistance to malaria infection. Understanding how human genetic variation impacts susceptibility to pathogens can reveal important aspects of disease biology and reveal...
How does human habitation relate to patterns in the natural environment? How do species respond to the presence of, and changes in, habitation? In this Data Expedition, students make use of public datasets from the Census and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility to examine relationships between individual species and human...
In this two-day, virtual data expedition project, students were introduced to the APIM in the context of stress proliferation, linked lives, the spousal relationship, and mental and physical health outcomes. Stress proliferation is a concept within the stress process paradigm that explains how one person’s stressors can influence others (Thoits...
This data expedition focused on the mechanisms animals use to orient using environmental stimuli, the methods that scientists use to test hypotheses about orientation, and the statistical methods used with circular orientation data. Students collected their own data set during the class period, performed hypothesis testing on their data using...
Female baboons occasionally exhibit large swellings on their behinds. Although these “sexual swellings” may evoke disgust from human on-lookers, they provide important information to group members about a female’s reproductive state. To figure out what these sexual swellings mean and whether male baboons notice, we need to look at the...
Over the course of two, one and a half hour sessions we led students in the Duke Marine Lab Marine Ecology class (Biology 273LA) on a data expedition using the statistical programming environment R. We gave an introduction to big data, the role of big data in ecology, important things...
Most phenomena that data scientists seek to analyze are either spatially or temporally correlated. Examples of spatial and temporal correlation include political elections, contaminant transfer, disease spread, housing market, and the weather. A question of interest is how to incorporate the spatial correlation information into modeling such phenomena. In this...
A large and growing trove of patient, clinical, and organizational data is collected as a part of the “Help Desk” program at Durham’s Lincoln Community Health Center. Help Desk is a group of student volunteers who connect with patients over the phone and help them navigate to community resources (like...
Fluid mechanics is the study of how fluids (e.g., air, water) move and the forces on them. Scientists and engineers have developed mathematical equations to model the motions of fluid and inertial particles. However, these equations are often computationally expensive, meaning they take a long time for the computer to...
This data expeditions module used three full course sessions to introduce undergraduate hydrology students with minimal programming background to: Public water data (water quantity and chemistry) Spatial analysis of water data 2 core, spatial datasets produced by the USGS that enable spatial analysis The programming language R R based tools for water...
This two-week teaching module in an introductory-level undergraduate course invites students to explore the power of Twitter in shaping public discourse. The project supplements the close-reading methods that are central to the humanities with large-scale social media analysis. This exercise challenges students to consider how applying visualization techniques to a...
KC and Patrick led two hands-on data workshops for ENVIRON 335: Drones in Marine Biology, Ecology, and Conservation. These labs were intended to introduce students to examples of how drones are currently being used as a remote sensing tool to monitor marine megafauna and their environments, and how machine learning...
Ecological data comes in various shapes and sizes. When conducting an ecological study, it is common to have population data (such as snail counts) and continuous sensor data (such as stream temperature with 35,000 data points collected each year!). Ecologists must reconcile data collected at different spatial and temporal scales...
This project allowed students in BIOL 268D (Mechanisms of Animal Behavior) to explore the relationship between estrogen, female sexual swellings, and male mating success in wild baboons using data from the Amboseli Baboon Research Project. Students learned how to use the popular R packages dplyr and ggplot2 to calculate descriptive statistics about the dataset...
Fluid mechanics is the study of how fluids (e.g., air, water) move and the forces on them. Scientists and engineers have developed mathematical equations to model the motions of fluid and inertial particles. However, these equations are often computationally expensive, meaning they take a long time for the computer to...
The data that students see in their statistics courses are often constrained to numeric and tabular data. However, there is an exciting field of data science and statistics known as text analysis. This expedition introduces students to the concept of treating text as data frames of words, and demonstrates how...
The goal of this Data Expedition was to introduce students to the exploration of social networks data using R. Students learned to load and plot a social network in R and then perform some basic analyses on two different networks: Hockey Fights in the National Hockey League in 2018-2019 and...
We led a 75-minute class session for the Marine Mammals course at the Duke University Marine Lab that introduced students to strengths and challenges of using aerial imagery to survey wildlife populations, and the growing use of machine learning to address these “big data” tasks. Graduate students: Gregory Larsen and Patrick...
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