Homework 2: Due January 25

This dataset has some problems (at least according to conventional wisdom about data). Please download it and open it in OpenRefine. Then:

  • eliminate leading and trailing whitespace throughout.
  • standardize the county names (the very last column).
  • separate the applicant city and state names (in the column entitled “Applicant City”) into two columns.

Please see our OpenRefine guide if you need a refresher.

Submit the “cleaned” dataset as a CSV, under the appropriate assignment on BruinLearn.

Further reading

On the ontology and history of data

Battle-Baptiste, Whitney, and Britt Rusert. W.E.B Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America. Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018.

Borgman, Christine L. Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2015.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

———. “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron, 2013. Halpern, Orit. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945, 2014.

Luther, Anne. “Local Data Design: An Interview with Professor Yanni Loukissas.” Data Matters, 13 July 2017.

McGlotten, Shaka. “Black Data.” Accessed January 31, 2017. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/traversing-technologies/shaka-mcglotten-black-data/.

Owens, Trevor. “Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?” Journal of Digital Humanities, March 16, 2012. http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/defining-data-for-humanists-by-trevor-owens/.

Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Porter, Theodore. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995.

On how to visualize data

Evergreen, Stephanie. Effective Data Visualization: The Right Chart for the Right Data. Los Angeles; London: SAGE Publications, 2017.

———. Presenting Data Effectively: Communicating Your Findings for Maximum Impact. Los Angeles; London: SAGE Publications, 2018.

Friendly, Michael. “A Brief History of Data Visualization.” In Handbook of Data Visualization, 15–56. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2008. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-33037-0_2.

Healy, Kieran. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2019.

Heer, Jeffrey, Michael Bostock, and Vadim Ogievetsky. “A Tour Through the Visualization Zoo.” ACM Queue 8, no. 5 (May 2010). http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/files/zoo/.

Knaflic, Cole Nussbaumer, ed. Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2015.

Tufte, Edward R. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 2001.

Yau, Nathan. Data Points: Visualization That Means Something. Indianapolis, IN: John Wiley & Sons, Inc, 2013.

———. Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics. Indianapolis, Ind: Wiley, 2011.