DE03: Design Exercise 3: Pictures and Questions

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Design Exercise

Design Exercise 3 will ask you to consider what visualizations to make to answer questions. We will continue to work with the Census Data.

This assignment will ask you to think more about the Census Data data set. The goal is to think about how questions and visualizations connect, and to start coming up with visualizations that answer questions.

Mechanics

This exercise will be turned in as a Canvas Survey: Design Exercise 03: Pictures and Questions. Most questions ask you to upload a file (a separate file for each question). You should be able to upload just about any image.

You will want to prepare all your images before going to Canvas to upload them. If you make multiple attempts to complete the survey, Canvas will forget your previous attempts.

You will receive full credit for taking the survey. We will grade your assignment and give you feedback using a different mechanism.

Note: only the last question asks you to actually use the data (and a tool to generate visualizations). The remaining questions ask you to create visualizations “by hand” using “imagined data”. For these questions, it is OK to draw digitally (e.g., using a drawing program on a tablet). But we expect most people to draw things on paper and “scan them”. You can take a picture of your paper with a cell phone (even better - use a scanning app on your phone!).

Note that each question is paired - you will turn in both an image, as well as a type in box explaining what we can see in the image. Use this box to describe your image and answer the question (generally what your design makes easy to see).

Question 1,2 - A simple question

We’ll start with a “simple” question to make a visualization for. There is a “standard answer”.

A bit about the data:

The data set labels each county with a “Rural-Urban Continuum” code for each county. There are 9 levels (this is ordinal, not interval), but you can assume they are grouped into 3 levels (again, ordinal, not interval): 1=urban, 2=suburban,3=rural.

The data set provides unemployment rates for every year from 2000-2022. We’re going to stop at 2019 (since 2020 unemployment is weird because of the pandemic).

Design a visualization for the task “show the differences in the trend/pattern of unemployement rates over the 20 years between the 3 different urban/rural levels”.

Remember: we are asking you to sketch, which means you need to imagine the data. You may not be an expert in unemployment rates in the US. That’s OK - you can imagine something. But, for this example, we want you to imagine that there is a difference in the patterns. That way, your design should make this difference clear.

Aside: Why this would be tricky in Tableau (or other tools)

Remember: we are asking you to sketch, not to make an actual picture from the data. To actually make this picture correctly is a bit tricky.

Problem 1: To compute the unemployment rate in for a group of counties (e.g., the counties with each urban/rural level), you cannot simply average the rates in the different counties. Some counties have lots of people, some have very few. You could do this with a weighted average (weighting each county by its size). Or you could compute the rates by summing the number of unemployed people and the total population for each level, and then find the ratio for each.

Problem 2: Because each year is a separate variable (or measure in Tableau), making many kinds of graphs requires putting a list of measures together. This is trickier than it should be in Tableau.

These problems are beyond basic Tableau skills (or at least my skills). This is a case where I probably would have written a script to re-organize the data in a format that would make things easy for Tableau.

Question 1 is to upload your sketch. Question 2 asks you to describe your sketch: explain what it is, but also what is hows (what can we see about your imagined data). You only need to describe 1-2 things that you can see.

Question 3,4 - the same question

In Question 1, we asked you to imagine the data had a difference in the patterns.

For this Question, we ask you to re-draw your sketch for question 1, using the same visualization design. Except this time, imagine the data was different: that the three different urbanness levels had similar patterns.

Your answer should be the same chart type as #1 (the same design), but with different data.

Notice that with 1 and 2 we can see if your design is effective at showing the difference between these two imagined data sets.

Question 3 is to upload your sketch. Question 4 asks you to describe your sketch: explain what it is, but also what is hows (what can we see about your imagined data). You only need to describe 1-2 things that you can see.

Question 5 and 6 - a slightly harder question

For this question we’re only considering 2023 (the data set has 2020-2023).

For each county, we know the population. We also know the number of births and deaths. There are other contibutors to net change, but for this part, we are only considering births and deaths.

How does the relationship between births and deaths vary across the country (relative to the population)? Is the balance relatively constant, or does it vary by location? Does urban/rural make a difference?

Again, you are imagining the data.

Create a design that shows this task of understanding birth/death rate relationships across the counties.

Submit your design as Question 5, and in the type-in box for Question 6, describe your design and what we can see in it.

Question 7-10 - a little more open ended

The data includes how many people migrate to each county (this is split into domestic and international migration). It also has the education levels and employment levels (numbers and rates).

Your task is to explain the kinds of places people migrate to. Do they go do places where there are jobs (low unemployment, or a large existing workforce)? Do they go to places where the existing population is more or less educated? Do they go to more rural or urban areas?

Note: you probably want to consider this in terms of rates.

For this task, create two different visualizations. Try to imagine similar data, but create two different visual designs. For each, describe the design, and what you might be able to see in it.

Upload your designs as Questions 7 and 9, and your descriptions in 8 and 10.

Question 11 - Make sure you can see the data!

Note: this is the only question where you should actually use the data and a visualization tool or program.

Next week, we will ask you to make visualizations from the data. This week, we want to make sure you are able to make something - including loading the data, drawing a picture, capturing the picture (screen shots are OK - or export as an image), and uploading it.

Make a visualization - any visualization - from the data. We just want you to show that you can load it into some tool that you will be able to use next week. We strongly encourage you to try Tableau. See the Tableau Tutorial for CS765: Getting Started with Census Data for a walkthrough of how to use Tableau with the Census Data. For the purposes of this question, it is totally acceptible to re-create one of the pictures in the tutorial (please do not copy my image - create the visualization yourself).