Rough Drafts

Albany Census Mapping: Rough Draft

Historical Context: 1850

In these sections will be a brief historical context for each year .

A new map will be created for each year from 1850 to 1940. If I can figure it out, they’ll be layerd over eachother and be able to be separated by year in order to better compare the numbers.

Each year will have foreign, domestic, and unspecified birthplaces.

One Comment

  • Maeve Kane

    A couple of big picture things: your color scale is using “Number of People”, which is the ID number for that person–you’re wildly skewing your numbers! If you look at your spreadsheet, one person has something like 2395 in their “Number of People” column, so you’re summing up every ID number between 1 and however many people you have on your spreadsheet, NOT counting the number of people! You should be using “Number of Records” for coloring your map.

    It’s unclear to me what the viewer gets from your treemap on the right that they aren’t getting from the maps. Especially since there’s so few of them (looks like ten total), this really over represents visually how many people are apparently from Australia or NZ, for example. Think about using this space to add additional new information, like the distribution of people from different areas in different occupations. You could set up a dashboard filter so that clicking on a state or country would give you only the occupations of the people from that country, which could be an interesting visual change over time.

    It looks like you only have 1850 in your source spreadsheet–in order to be able to page through each year, you’re going to have to put all the other years back in your spreadsheet. You’ve also got something hinky with your plain birthplace dimension–that appears to have gotten changed so that there’s only one item per country in it. You should duplicate your Birthplace (BPL) dimension, make the new one Geographic Role > Country, and get rid of the plain Birthplace dimension.

    To layer your foreign and domestic maps, you’ll need to do a dual axis map by dragging the latitude measure next to the latitude you’ve already got, then right click > dual axis. Then on your marks card you’ll have an option to put Birthplace (state) and Birthplace (country) on two different color cards. I’ll stop by tomorrow and get you set up. See the attached screenshot for how to start this.

    As a general aesthetic thing to make your data clearer, you should adjust your color scale way, way down, since NY has so many people it throws your scale way off–double click your color card, hit advanced, and fix your color scale way down to 500 or 1000 to make the other places more apparent. You should also spend some time editing your locations (hit the “34 unknown” little gray button in the lower right to see the locations Tableau doesn’t recognize), and edit your tooltips a bit to make the information you want to convey clearer.

    It look like you want to make an argument about how immigration to Albany changed over time. What trends do you think you’ve got here looking at 1850? What other dimensions could make that story more interesting, like gender, occupation, or relation to household head? Do people who weren’t born in the US tend to live with non-family members more?