The data we want to analyze will most often come from outside Python. In many cases, we may have a data dump from a database or website and have to bring it into Python to sift through it. A data dump gets its name from containing a large amount of data (possibly at a very granular level) and often not discriminating against any of it initially; for this reason, they can often be unwieldy.
Often, these data dumps will come in the form of a text file (.txt) or a CSV file (.csv). Pandas provides many methods to read in different types of files, so it is simply a matter of looking up the one that matches our file format. Our earthquake data is a CSV file; therefore, we use the pd.read_csv() function to read it in. However, we should ...