Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
8
ACCESSING AND
USING WEB-BASED
DATA
Chapter summary
•
A database can be any file or group of files that stores structured data.
•
To the surprise of some, blogs and wikis are often built into databases.
•
It is helpful to know how a relational database functions when preparing
to perform data analysis.
•
It is wise to do a complete assessment before downloading any online data.
There are endless variations on the type and format of data available to the
researcher. Data may be created by the researcher or may have been collected
previously by other researchers or some agency. Some data are explicitly
entered into a computer by the researcher, some are stored automatically by a
data collection application. In this chapter, we will examine a few different
types of data and how they are represented; we will look at some issues with
receiving data from other sources; and we will also describe how to protect and
restrict access to stored data.
At one level, data can be considered quantitative or qualitative (also
referred to as structured and unstructured). Structured data are data that
have numerical values or are represented as categories. Unstructured data
are typically documents or audio or video streams which have not been
reduced or processed.
Whether quantitative or qualitative, data are stored as files on computers,
and there are many ways to do so. In the simplest format, character and num-
ber data can be stored in text files, with no formatting information other than
the end-of-line marker. In software parlance, structured and unstructured have
a slightly different meaning from that described in the previous paragraph.
A structured data file is one that has internal information on how the data are
to be represented. An example of a structured data file is a spreadsheet. The file
itself contains information about the rows, columns and cells and knows how
to represent the data values within, whether they are numbers, text or dates,
