Lesson Contribution - Dates as Data & Exporting Data Episodes

[Talishask]

I'm a member of The Carpentries staff and I'm submitting this issue on behalf of another member of the community. In most cases, I won't be able to follow up or provide more details other than what I'm providing below.

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Episode: Dates as Data

I would suggest moving the text under Historical data to the Excel's date systems pin in the Dates stored as integers section. This would eliminate the Historical Data Section. I believe having the explanations of both date systems (1900 and 1904) in the same section of the episode makes the lesson flow better. Alternatively, some more context could be added to the Historical Data section, with the possibility of moving the explanation of the two date systems to that section.

• This is the text that I am referring to: "Excel is unable to parse dates from before 1899-12-31, and will thus leave these untouched. If you're mixing historic data from before and after this date, Excel will translate only the post-1900 dates into its internal format, thus resulting in mixed data. If you're working with historic data, be extremely careful with your dates!"

Under the Dates stored as integers section, there should be an explanation of how to handle adding years, months, and days together, as that can be more challenging than what is written. I think an explanation similar to that of the Ecology lesson could suffice:

• First, extract the single entities (day, month, or year)
• We can then add values to each
• Finally, the complete data string is reconstructed using the Date( ) function.

Episode: Exporting Data

In the Exporting Data episode, there is little to no explanation of in what situations one would want to save a file as a TSV (tab separated values) file as opposed to a CSV file. Although CSV files are favored for interoperability purposes, there are situations where a researcher might want to consider using a TSV file. One possible explanation is given below.

• Explanation: TSV files can be used for exporting and exchanging data among various databases. It can also be used to retrieve database data. TSV files are very efficient for programs such as JavaScript, Perl, or Python to process without losing any typing information.

[burrowsdt]

Thanks for sharing these notes! I agree that integrating the Historical Data text into an earlier section on date systems makes sense. If anyone wants to take a stab at it and submit a pull request, please feel free -- otherwise I will work on it soon.

On adding dates/months/years together, including this would add new content to the lesson -- this is always an issue to consider because of time constraints. I wonder if it might be a good candidate as an additional exercise for the lesson, that way instructors can include it if think they think it fits their audience and other considerations?

I agree that a brief explanation of TSV files might be useful in the Exporting Data episode. Anyone is welcome to submit a PR for this task.