Data Vis for Journalists Fall 2016, Lab 6

In this final assignment, you'll put together everything you've learned in this module to create a polished story with vizzes about some newsworthy dataset that you find or create at its core.

• Story With Data (twbx)
• Seven Data Story Types (twbx)
  • Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories
• World Population Day (twbx)
• Energy Access (csv)
  • Original story @ DiscourseMedia

Instructions:

• Find, or create, a newsworthy dataset. (Don't reuse one you used in a past lab.)
• Analyze this data with Tableau, creating vizzes that showcase your findings. At least one should be static, at least one should be linked/interactive (using actions).
• Upload your vizzes to Tableau Public
• Write up an illustrated story suitable for public consumption, featuring your vizzes at its heart. It should be under 1500 words and should include images created with Tableau and also at least one interactive viz embedded from Tableau Public.
• In a separate document (also illustrated with images), write up your design rationale and reflections on process. Discuss both your findings and any dead ends that you ran into in your analysis process. Provide a rigorous rationale for your decision decisions, especially the effectiveness of your visual encoding choices (both the visual encodings you used in the final story, and those you decided were not so effective and did not include).
• Submit both documents in PDF format, send your Tableau file as a packaged workbook (tbwx format, not tbw format), and and also send the URL for your Tableau Public uploads.
• Send by email to tmm AT cs.ubc.ca and caitlin AT discoursemedia.org by 9am Tue Nov 1, with subject "JOURN Week 6".

Resources

• Data repositories section of Resources page

• The Story With Data, Seven Data Stories, and World Population Day workbooks are courtesy of Ben Jones, with minor tweaks to the instructions to clarify ambiguities and update for Tableau 10. Ben is Director of Product Marketing for Tableau Public, author of Communicating Data with Tableau, and instructor at the University of Washington. Seven Data Stories was presented by Jones at the Tapestry Conference 2015.
• The Energy Access example was developed by Caitlin Havlak.