Vis for Journalists Fall 2015 Lab/Assignment 1

1. Install Tableau on your own laptop, either with the course license key or by getting individual student license yourself.

2. Work through Vienna step-by-step tutorial for visualizing two datasets of Chicago crime 2015, US forest fires. Notes:
   • p 2: Make sure to filter by 2015 by checking the box to the left of the text field after typing in that number, otherwise you'll download a 1.4GB file instead of a 41MB file!
   • p 3: You may need to hit the 'Update now' button in order to see something
   • p 4: The latest version of Tableau appears to work without needing to wrangle the data, so you may not need to change any default settings
   • p 20: The lat/long coordinates may automatically have the AVG operator applied to them, if so use the dropdown menu to change status to Dimension for each of them
   • p 20: You may need to change mouse function to a lasso using the buttons in the upper left of the map in order to select points.
   • p 21: After selecting the color palette you may need to hit the 'Assign Palette' button to activate it.

3. Work through this step-by-step Tableau Intro Music Sales tutorial. (I have made minor fixes from the original version.)

4. Download one of these two 1033 Program info datasets directly from Tableau Public using the 'Download Workbook' option, and try making at least three substantive changes to it based on what you saw in Robert's demo and what you've learned from the two previous tutorials:
   • The facts about PROGRAM 1033: How the US Police became Militarized
   • 2011-2013 Dispursements of Military Equipment to Local Police Departments under 1033 Program

5. Browse Tableau Public and pick three vizes that look interesting to play with. For each of them, download the workbook and make at least two substantive changes to try out new features of Tableau that you had not used before.

6. Submit before class time next week.
   • Your written reflections on what you've found in the 7 datasets. How could you use the viz for this data: to tell a story to others, or to get a sense of the story for yourself as part of investigation? Or do you argue that you found nothing useful/newsworthy in this dataset?
   • Your reflection should be text illustrated by screenshots of the vizes you've created. An informal style is fine, but correct grammar and spelling are required.
   • Send in by email by 9am Tue Sep 22, with subject "JOURN Week 1", in PDF format.

7. Time estimate: this assignment is intended to take no more than 7 hours. If you're done early, download Robert's demo workbook (it's 145MB) and try exploring the Kiva dataset. Note that this workbook will only run under Tableau 9.1, which requires Mac OS 10.9 or greater.