One Comment

  • Maeve Kane

    May 7, 2019 at 12:48 am

    You need a bit more introduction about why, exactly, Pittsfield matters, and what your argument is. Give us some context besides that language and religion are important. What’s the time period, where is this, what is Pittsfield similar to and why do we care?

    Your video for part 1 isn’t showing up. The moving background is also VERY distracting. The color combo of navy on teal is not very readable. Try a lighter background so that your text is easier to read.

    Parts 2 and 3 need different titles to avoid confusion.

    You should do some editing of your tooltips; the Tableau defaults are not very intuitive. You should clarify in your text and your tooltips that the % is the percent of people of that ethnicity living in each ward, not the percent of people in that ward were that ethnicity. EG, 50% of Poles live in Ward 7, not Ward 7 is 50% Poles. There’s also a LOT of unused space in your birthplace bargraphs–these would be more readable if they were laid out a little larger so there wasn’t so much blank space.

    The new layout is vastly improved and more readable, and your write up of how to read them is great. A more extended narration of what each set means, particularly for the MA/NY/US one, would be helpful. What’s it mean that no more than 25% of a group lived in any one ward? And if they were truly evenly distributed, you’d have 14% of the population in each ward, so 25% is actually much higher than one would expect for perfectly even. What about the 1920 Germans who cluster and then even out in 1940?

    This: “This does not mean that religious similarity did not have an impact” is a double negative and needs to be clarified. You also flip back and forth between present and past tense, especially in Part 2.

    What’s up with how the Austrians, Poles, and French flip from Ward 1 in 1920 to Ward 7 in 1940? Does anything account for that?

    You should give some guidance in your Maps section about interesting groups to look at, since you give so many possible options. You should also clean up the tooltip (lat/lon isn’t necessary) and consider doing a % based count on your map as well–Denmark, for example, looks at first glance like there’s a TON of people in Ward 1 in 1920, but really there’s only 8 and the scale is small. Think about coloring your maps as ethnicity as a percent of the total ward population. (eg, colored by Poles are x% of the total population of this ward). This will help give you an idea of how densely ethnic a ward was.