Understanding Data in the Media The University of Sheffield

Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real time analytics and explore best practices for transforming how we plan large-scale computing projects.

Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to understand the use of small numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making Sense of Data in the Media.'

Dr Mark Taylor - Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the Sheffield Methods Institute explains how to break down bigger numbers in this excerpt from our new free, open online course 'Making Sense of Data in the Media.'

Data experts Ted Dunning and Ellen Friedman discuss how data is used in today's digital society. They examine the enormous potential offered by big data, explain the new technologies that enable real time analytics and explore best practices for transforming how we plan large-scale computing projects.

In this video, we hear from Joe Twyman, the Head of Political and Social Research for Europe, Middle East and Africa at YouGov (an internet-based market research company) about his experience of conducting research through surveys.Joe explains some of the basic principles of surveying, why web-based surveys are an increasingly important mode of survey data collection and how to read survey results properly.

A sample is a subset of a population. It lies at the heart of survey research. It is sometimes called a ‘miniature of the population’, so the process of drawing a sample should maximise the similarity between the population under study and the sample.In this video, educator Aneta Piekut looks at how we select the members of the population to achieve this goal.