New Skills Unlocked?!
A mapping and data visualization project takes a lot of patience for someone who does not have a lot of experience spending hours using Excel. Over this project I have learned how to work through issues specific to the Bills of Mortality as well as data visualization at large. My understanding of the project outline is to finish data cleaning this semester and officially analyze it.
Accessibility
Throughout this project, I am trying to remember that accessibility is important with my map color choices and how legible the labels I add will be. I do not want the colors to blend together too much but make it work for colorblind people. Accessibility is important to me in general but I am attempting to understand how it makes a massive difference in how the data I am showcasing can be received by viewers. Colorbrewer2 and this How to Design for Color Blindness article have been great resources for me along the way.
OpenRefine and Clean Data
Another skill I have found is efficiency in spreadsheet data cleaning. Now I know efficiency and spreadsheeting tend to be polar opposites, but I have taken the time to understand amazing software like OpenRefine that help to clean up data more quickly. This does mean that for this project I am text mining the names of parishes where accidents or murders happened, putting it into a new column, then cleaning the data of that column later, which is a bit of a process.
The Process Requires Patience
I could have done this differently and simply cleaned the data of the parish names in the original text instead of putting it in another column. However, my goal is to leave some level of historical intent within the text. By this I mean that the software should be able to read and connect the data, while the audience can read the original text of the death. This leaves space to speculate without me or a software intervening and possibly misunderstanding the event. All these moments have reminded me that data is not some quick or nebulus thing, but a process with many steps.