D A T A B A S E J O U R N A L I S M

INTRODUCTION

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

• What’s your name?

• Where are you from?

• Why are you taking this course?

• What’s your favorite spot on the internet?

WHAT’S A DATABASE?

• Software that runs on a server

• Stores structured information

• Usually not directly accessible by other computers

on the internet

WHY DATABASES?

• Almost every site you visit collects information about

you and stores it in a database

• You live in the information age.

• Would you rather be manipulate data or get manipulated

by data?

TAKE FACEBOOK

• Your hard drive is probably about 500 gigabytes.

Facebook collects 512,000 of those full of data

everyday.

• 2.5 billion shares (status updates, wall posts, photos, videos,

comments)

• 2.7 billion likes

• 300 million photos

• 70,000 queries executed

WHAT YOU WILL DO IN THIS COURSE

• Analyze data through code

• Social networks, news articles, photos, wikileaks data dumps, bills in congress, etc.

• Present that data via web interfaces

• Make something useful out of something that you just can’t

comprehend otherwise

SOME EXAMPLES

ARE YOU EXPERIENCED?

• HTML

• CSS

• JavaScript

• Anything else

HOW THE WEB WORKS

PC

Your

PC

PC

Internet

Service

ProviderInternet

Service

Provider

Google

YouTube

Server

PC

PC

HOW THE WEB WORKS

PC

Your

PC

PC

Internet

Service

ProviderInternet

Service

Provider

Google

YouTube

Server

PC

PC

COURSEWORK

• Relational Database Design

• Models

• API Mashups

• Data mining/scraping tool

• Final Project

• Polished Mashup or Data Scraping/Mining Tool

GRADING

• Each assignment is worth a specified number of

points

• Thoughtfulness

• Does the assignment provoke deeper thinking?

• Ease of Use

• How easy is it for me to use your application?

• Beauty

• Does the visual design add to and complement the overall

product?

• Effort

• Did you give it everything you had?

SPEAKING OF EFFORT

• Coding can be hard. It requires a lot of practice.

• When assignments are due, you should submit them

online through the class website even if they don’t

work properly.

• If you turn the assignment in on time, you can keep

iterating on it without penalties for turning it in late.

AND DON’T STEAL CODE

• There are a lot of examples on the web

• It’s perfectly fine to use and learn from them

• It’s another thing entirely to not give credit to that

person

• If you fail to attribute code borrowed from

somewhere else, I will fail you with prejudice

LET’S TAKE A LOOK AT MAMP

THE COURSE WEBSITE

• http://courses.dataplayed.com/um/cvj531

• http://courses.dataplayed.com/um/cvj531/register

• The registration code is swartz

HTML RECAP