Blog Post: First Few Weeks - AlexSanford13/Planes_vs_Animals GitHub Wiki

Animals vs Planes

Week 1-2 Blog: Beginning Python

This Digital Humanities project analyzing the open FAA data on animal strikes by planes. I hoped to be able to analyze the entire countries data, but I was unable to get that data in an analyzable format. Using Jupyter Notebooks in my quest to learn the Python language to learn data analysis and visualization I took a csv file of the Pennsylvania data and analyzed it.

Going into this project I know absolutely nothing about Python. I have done a minuscule amount of website design using HTML5 and CSS3, along with very basic java scripting. I have learned all of these things during my time at Pitt studying for my MLIS. This interest in Data analysis, management, web design, and other aspects of librarianship started while at Pitt. Therefore I hoped to culminate all of these skills into one project for my Digital Humanities class, alongside my Data Science for Librarians courses during my Summer term.

I started looking at the FAA data using pure python scripting. I learned how to import the file, create tables and view the data using Python. My first few weeks I learned the very basic aspects of these. I have included the Jupyter Notebook titled Early_Data_Analysis.ipynb that details this early analysis. I was able to see many of the things I had hoped to udnerstand, but it took more complex and detailed scripts to do so.

I started out hoping to see where most of the strikes take place, what stage of the flight, what animals, and how much damage is done. I hope to in the end see what birds do more damage, and normalize this information based on how busy these airports are, but I definitely do not possess these skills yet. I also am not bale to pull out certain subsets of the data using my current skills. So for now I only can see what things are true among the entire data set.