Welcome to an introduction to the tools we'll use in LA Counts data instructables! This introduction is for anyone interested in analyzing data and creating data visualizations.

You won't need any special skills or programming experience, only a curiosity about using data for advocacy. We also will use only freely available tools so you can easily analyze your own datasets.

Tools for Data Analysis

In these instructables we take a "data science" approach to analyzing data. This means we are interested in using software to extract social scientific insights. Some of the analyses you can do at the start might be familiar to you from working in Microsoft Excel. However, the difference with software is you can so do much more!

Here are some things you'll learn to do with a data science perspective in these instructables:

• Extract insights about your local neighborhood through data
• Learn how to use data analyses to Analyze datasets using statistical techniques
• Generate charts to use in reports and presentations