MDL Tutorials

This guide is suitable for new Tableau users looking for information on producing popular data visualizations in Tableau, such as bar graphs, line graphs, scatterplots, tree maps, and dashboards. If you are looking for more general data visualization tips, please see the Map and Data Library's Data Visualization Guide. You can find instructions on installing and acquiring a free academic license for Tableau here. If you are running Tableau on a Mac, please note that there may be some variation between the Windows version used to design this guide and the program as it appears on a Mac.

The data used in this guide are public datasets retrieved from the World Bank’s Open Data repository, the United Nation's Open Data Population Division, and the full text of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet available through MIT's website, with a frequency table generated through Voyant Tools. You can find more information regarding the data sources used in this guide in the subsection entitled "10. Data Sources".

This tutorial was created using Tableau Desktop version 2020.2.

This tutorial has been developed for OpenRefine version 3.6.1. 

We are going to work with a bit messier dataset now for the next few tasks. This is a citizen science dataset captured using an app called iNaturalist. The data was captured for a city nature challenge and shared on data.world. This activity will showcase some more features in OpenRefine.

The goal of this activity is to create a new project with this citizen science dataset and work with the data. You will use clustering to improve the consistency of the dataset. You will also perform various manipulations, such as split and concatenate. Finally, you will learn various ways to remove columns and rows, and work with the Undo/Redo features in OpenRefine.

Before you begin, please download the OpenRefine workshop sample datasets, if you have not already.

Note: This assumes that you have learned the basics of OpenRefine already through the Survey of Household Spending activity.

This is a guide to installing and running OpenRefine on your personal computer. Please note that all computers in the Map and Data Library (on the fifth floor of Robarts) and in the computer labs on the fourth and fifth floors of Robarts Library already have OpenRefine installed.

This tutorial has been developed for OpenRefine version 3.6.1.

Please note that we also have converted some of this tutorial into a self-paced course with videos. U of T students, staff, and faculty can enroll in our OpenRefine Quercus course.

This is the first activity in this tutorial series, and assumes no prior knowledge of OpenRefine. In this activity you will be importing a spreadsheet of data into OpenRefine and exploring it. The goal of this activity is to use a simple dataset to introduce you to the OpenRefine user interface and some of the basic types of tasks you can accomplish. This dataset isn’t particularly “messy,” but provides some of the core knowledge needed to work with messier datasets in later activities.

If you need a copy of OpenRefine on your personal computer, please follow these installation instructions. 

Before you begin, please download the OpenRefine workshop sample datasets.

This tutorial will help you install ArcGIS Pro on your Windows operating system offline (not connected to the internet). Authenticating ArcGIS Pro in this way will require relicensing each year. Almost all UofT users prefer to authenticate ArcGIS Pro using the UTORid/online method. Please follow the Licensing ArcGIS Pro instructions for this method.

Before beginning the installation process please request a license code. If you are a Mac user, please read this page about running Windows in OS X before requesting a code.

Link to a video tutorial on how to find statistics and manipulate tables to get the data you need.

This tutorial will take you through two ways of logging in to your ESRI ArcGIS Online account for the first time using your UTORid.

This tutorial provides an overview of the Online version of ArcGIS, one of ESRI's many mapping tools.

ArcGIS Online is a complete, scalable and secure software-as-a-service cloud-based mapping platform which can be used to make and share maps.

This tutorial covers two methods for clipping raster datasets from ArcMap.

This tutorial will cover how to download census data and census boundary files and matching them together in ArcMap for further analysis. Census data will be downloaded using CHASS. 

Please visit this link for extensive help with Scholars GeoPortal.

This guide is primarily designed to help users unfamiliar with the CANSIM database to find and download data through CHASS.

Please note that a University of Toronto IP address is required to access CHASS.

Note: CANSIM data may also be accessed through the Statistics Canada website. Tutorial available here.

This tutorial provides an example of finding, extracting, and downloading data from Scholars GeoPortal. Scholars GeoPortal is a geospatial discovery tool that provides access to large scale geospatial datasets that can be used for mapping or analysis. Scholars Geoportal can be used to access both vector and raster data on a variety of topics such as land-use, transportation networks, census geography, aerial imagery, geology, and more. 

The CHASS Canadian Census Analyser allows members of the University of Toronto research community to generate custom tables from the Census of Canada (1961-2016) and the National Household Survey (2011). This tutorial provides an example of extracting and downloading data from CHASS.

This online tutorial will provide an introduction to SimplyAnalytics and a few of its many possible uses. SimplyAnalytics is a web-based data visualization application. It can be used to create simple thematic maps and tables from census and other socio-demographic data, as well as business point data.

The guide in this PDF will teach the user how to generate contours using DEM files in Global Mapper.

The following PDF contains an article that elaborates on citation rules for machine-readable data in Canadian historical journals. 

This document compiles online resources that help to build terrain 3D models with a variety of software-options.  Brief introductions on the pros and cons of each option are provided.

This guide is primarily designed to help users unfamiliar with the CANSIM database find and download data.

Note: This guide outlines how to search for CANSIM data on the Statistics Canada website. University of Toronto faculty, staff, and students may also download CANSIM series for free via CHASS. You will need to be using a UofT IP address to access CHASS.

Stata is a good tool for cleaning and manipulating data, regardless of the software you intend to use for analysis. This workshop is suitable for both first time data-cleaners and for those familiar with data cleaning. 

This tutorial demonstrates how to load SDA data for use in Stata.

The PDF guide below illustrates how to convert an ASCII text file containing posal codes into a SAS dataset compatible with Statistics Canada's PCCF+ SAS program (verstion 6A1), and then how to run the PCCF+ program.

Link to CHASS list of how-to guides for SDA: http://sda.chass.utoronto.ca/legacy_sda/sda.htm#how_to