Data Science: Wrangling

  • Free to audit
  • Paid certificate
  • Course certificate
  • Beginner
  • 8 weeks
Provider
Harvard
Cost
Free to audit
Certificate
Paid, $149
Level
Beginner
Duration
8 weeks
Effort
1–2 hrs/week
Format
Self-paced
Language
English
Subjects
Data Science
Source
Harvard Online
Last verified
14 Sep 2026

Free access to the material ends after the course length; graded work and the certificate are paid.

Data Science: Wrangling deals with the messy first stage of most data projects: getting data out of files, databases, web pages, tweets or PDFs and into a tidy form in R. The course covers importing data from different file formats, web scraping and HTML parsing, tidying with the tidyverse, string processing with regular expressions, wrangling with dplyr, working with dates and times, and text mining. Harvard notes that rarely does one analysis need every step, but a data scientist is likely to meet all of them eventually, and that cleaning data well is what makes later insights possible.

Part of HarvardX's Professional Certificate in Data Science, it is self-paced, eight weeks long at 1 to 2 hours per week, and rated introductory. Harvard lists the course as free to audit on edX, with a verified certificate available for $149.

Advertisement

What you’ll learn

  • Import data into R from different file formats
  • Scrape and parse data from web pages
  • Tidy data with the tidyverse and wrangle it with dplyr
  • Process strings with regular expressions
  • Work with dates, times and text

Who it’s for

R users who spend more time cleaning data than analysing it and want systematic techniques.

Source: Harvard Online (opens in a new tab) · Verified · Report a change

Advertisement
Free to auditOpens pll.harvard.edu Go to course (opens in a new tab)