5.6 Final Lab

You made it! It’s the final lab for the year!

Objectives

This lab is intended to evaluate your ability to:

• find and prepare a dataset for analysis
• statistically describle variables of a dataset using supporting evidence
• use pandas to analyze and explore a dataset
• create intentional visualizations for a dataset
• tell a cohesive and engaging story about your data
• analyze potential sources of error and bias in your data

Primary Deliverable

You will be creating a blog post in the style of the following examples. Find a dataset and write a narrative that provides context, exploration, and analysis of that data. This narrative should be accompanied by visualizations as appropriate. Also think about additional details, such as illustrations and photos!

• NYT Gerrymandering
• Women’s Pockets
• Seeing How Much We Ate Over The Years
• Job Numbers
• Hollywood and U.S. Military

Secondary Deliverable

Not all of your analysis will make it into your narrative, and that’s ok! The main goal of that narrative is to provide an engaging story. However, this lab is also meant to assess your understanding of the skills we’ve learned this semester.

You will also be submitting evidence of analysis – this can be in any form you want; for example, you can submit a writeup, your Python notebook, your sketches, etc.

Your submission should show evidence of:

• meta-analysis of your data
  • errors, biases, cleanliness, trustworthiness, etc
• statistical description of your dataset
  • distributions, proportions, relationships
• exploratory visualizations
• inferential statistics (if applicable)

Timeline

You will have 4 weeks to write and submit this lab.

Academic Honesty

You are allowed to work with others on this lab, as long as you do not share any code or files! Please refer to the syllabus for more details.

You are allowed to use modules we haven’t talked about in class, as long as they are cited, and in your blog post you include an explanation of how and why they are used.