Data Vis for Journalists Fall 2016, Lab 4

• Week 4 Demo 1 Seattle Construction workbook
• Week 4 Demo 2 Internet Use workbook
• Home Price Index tutorial PDF
  • house price index data XLS
  • NYT story Home Prices in 20 Cities

Instructions:

• The first two parts of this assignment are to be done in the same groups of two as last week's assignment. The third part is solo.

• See House Price Index demo above. Work through anything we didn't have time for in class; review what we did work through to solidify your understanding.
  • Check out the original New York Times piece on Home Prices in 20 Cities
  • Start a new Tableau workbook
  • Connect the house price index CSV (comma-separated values) source to your workbook
  • Pivot the data.
  • Create the initial view and set the starting date with a filter.
  • Create parameters and fields to control color and size of highlighted city.
  • Calculate the index date and use it to control the display.
  • Use a fixed date range and add reference line.

• Add interactivity to your workbook from last week
  • Add linked highlighting between at least two views with highlight/hover action.
  • Upload the viz to Tableau Public
  • Revise your news story to incorporate this new interactive component.

• Write up a proposal for your final project.
  • See Lab 6 Instructions for more about the project.
  • Plan to spend some significant time thinking about the dataset for your project: finding appropriate data and starting some intial experimentation in Tableau to convince yourself that what you'd like to do is realistic and possible. Your proposal should explain the big picture of your project idea, and should either include a link to a suitable dataset or a description of how you intend to create the dataset.
  • The proposal should be under 500 words and in PDF format. Illustrations are not required (although feel free to include them if your initial explorations have any promising preliminary results).

• Submit both completed workbooks, the revised news story in PDF format, and the URL for your Tableau Public viz (just one mail for both team members). Also, send your final project proposal individually. Send by email to tmm AT cs.ubc.ca and caitlin AT discoursemedia.org by 9am Oct 11, with subject "JOURN Week 4 team" for the first email and subject "JOURN Week 4 solo" for the second one.

• The Seattle Construction and Internet Use 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.
• The Home Price Index example is based on an exercise developed by Robert Kosara of Tableau Research from his talk Recreating News Visualizations in Tableau at the 2014 Tableau Customer Conference.