Data Vis for Journalists Fall 2016, Lab 5

• Week 5 Demo 1 Wrangling tutorial PDF
  • Market Rental Pricing xlsx
  • Income xlsx
  • Average Rent xlsx
• Week 5 Demo 2 Simple survey workbook

Downloads

• Week 5 Assignment Angus Reid survey workbook
• Download survey data:
  • Responses by gender xlsx
  • Responses by province xlsx
  • Responses by age xlsx
  • Responses by education xlsx
  • Responses by household income xlsx
• Background information:
  • Survey questions PDF
  • Messy original survey data PDF

As Hillary Clinton takes her official place as the first female presidential nominee in U.S. history, the glass ceiling she put "18 million cracks" into during her 2008 bid for the Democratic nomination will finally be smashed. Depending on how things go in November, she could well make history again as America's first elected female president.

Many will say it's about time the United States caught up. Theresa May is now the second female prime minister of the United Kingdom. Her European Union counterpart is German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Canadians went there and did that 23 years ago, under former Progressive Conservative prime minister Kim Campbell; the latest iteration of her party is now led by Rona Ambrose. But let's not get too smug; Ms. Campbell's months-long term was followed by 25 years of male PMs.

Achieving milestones is impressive, but current public perception can better inform where Canadian society really stands when it comes to women and political leadership.

• This assignment should be done with a partner of your choice.
• For this assignment, we will explore survey data conducted by the Angus Reid Institute on Canadian perspectives on women in politics. There are eight questions in the survey. Responses for each question are broken down by gender, province, education level, household income and age. There is a separate spreadsheet for each of these parameters. You will find these spreadsheets linked to above.

• Start by completing the workbook (link above), then explore the dataset in more detail. The workbook covers a simple bar and pie chart using the survey data responses by province. How else might you explore this data visually? Beyond what is covered in the workbook, you will need to connect the other spreadsheets to the workbook. What other key information do you get from the other parameters, i.e., age, gender, household income, education level?

• Provide a write-up describing your design and your findings. What story (or stories) are you trying to tell? What is the most compelling story in this dataset? Note that you are not being asked to submit a story this week, just the reflection/rationale.

• In your write-ups, you should also provide a rigorous rationale for your design decisions. Document the visual encoding you used to spatially arrange the data and that choice is appropriate for the data. How did your decision facilitate effective communication? Try to apply the design principles discussed in class so far.

• Note that understanding the data and its numerous variables, and designing the visualization may take some time, so plan accordingly.

• Submit your work as a PDF to both instructors by email (caitlin AT discoursemedia.org and tmm AT cs.ubc.ca) by 9am Tue Oct 18, with subject "JOURN Week 5".

• The wrangling tutorial and survey workbooks were developed by Caitlin Havlak.