Dear friends, Alberto here (again!) Today we’re launching our 12th Open Visualization Academy course, Kae Petrin’s ‘Critical Data Exploration with Spreadsheets’.

Kae is a data and Graphics Reporter at Civic News Company, an educator, and an industry leader. Last year, Kae and I, along with many other journalists and designers, collaborated in the Trans News Initiative tracker; it was a great experience.

If you have little experience handling data and preparing it for analysis and visualization, Kae’s tutorial is for you. Kae teaches elementary data wrangling, cleaning, and exploration, moving from the very basics —spreadsheet formulas or pivot tables— to more advanced skills, such as dealing with messy data sets.

What comes next in the Open Visualization Academy? You can see most of our planned courses here, although we’ve made some schedule changes.

In July we’ll launch ‘Learning Objectives for Communicative Visualizations’ by Elsie Lee-Robbins and Eytan Adar. If you’ve watched my own OVA course, you know how fond I am of their research (read these papers: 1, 2, 3), so I’m very excited about their course.

We’ll take a break in August. In September we’ll return with either Enrico Bertini’s and Racquel Fygenson’s ‘How to Read Charts’, Alyssa Fower’s ‘Visualizing Loss and Tragedy’, or with a new software tutorial by me, aimed at absolute beginners. It’s an overview of the whole visualization design process, from obtaining data to creating an entire infographic based on it.

That’s all for today. I hope you’ll enjoy Kae’s course.