I have been taking a data analytics part-time course through General Assembly for the last few months. My interest in data analytics began when working on my thesis for Boston Universityʻs Gastronomy program, where I now realize I was attempting to teach myself the basics of computational linguistics to explore how what cookbooks tell us about the context of their creation is as important as the food instructions. Examining the word and phrase choice throughout the works can allow us to explore the reveling choices made by the cookbook creators. At the time, Summer 2020, I did not have the headspace to learn vocabulary that would have made my work simpler to explain or learn to write simple SQL statements that would have made searching my spreadsheet far easier. My thesis was a time of exploration, but it has since become clear that using SQL would have avoided many mistakes throughout the process, and if I want to continue the work, I needed to learn the proper tools and vocabulary.
While the class focused on business analytics, I was soon reminded that that is not one of my strengths. While I did use the suggested Superstore data-set to learn to write SQL statements (exploring table discounts in Australia) for the final project I was able to The Mary Eliza Project data set from the Boston City archives. More information about the dataset can be found in this article.
Having used Tableau Public for my thesis work without SQL and using it for this project with knowledge of basic SQL was a revelation. I was able to dig into the data-set in less stressful ways, without constantly making changes to my spreadsheet. This allowed me to spend more time with the actual analysis.
While Iʻm glad I had the freedom while working with my thesis to explore Tableau Public, using it now, after learning basic SQL statements allowed me to spend time perfecting the spreadsheet and go down some rabbit holes with the data.
It is now clear that my brain was processing current events in Ukraine. The data set provides the places of birth of New Women Voters in Boston as recorded by a town clerk in 1920. Some of the women immigrated from Eastern Europe between 1880-1920. Their recorded birthplaces reflect constant changes in that region. I spent significant time trying to explain “Russian-Poland” and its variants before deciding to map the geographic details I found in the data-set in Tableau Public which meant I had to determine the current official name of the country to have the birthplace recognized by Tableau. I found myself trying to place as many womenʻs birthplaces not in Russia, but in Ukraine and Poland when appropriate. These New Women Voters tried to have the official record reflect their national identity and found ways to hint at how they saw their birthplace in a Voter Registration document.
A current version of my capstone project can be found at Beyond Simple Voting Records: Exploring The Mary Eliza Project