For our final project we had to play around with a visualization tool, and for my choice I wanted to use Tableau and the Word Clouds. I chose to go with Tableau the most because that’s what was going to be best with my end projects. I chose to first start with their sample data and play around with that. I chose to do that because it would help me get a sense of what I am doing with the website. Using their information helped me get an idea of what information went best in the different options, and what different options for graphs there were. After finally getting a hang of the options of the program, I began to put my information into the graphs from the censuses. After doing this I was able to see the best graphs I could use and which ones best represented my information. I decided that the best graphs for my information were a line graph and map graphs with the mouse over option. I really liked Tableau and I think it will be very useful as I move on in school and possibly into jobs that I take. For teaching I can use it the same way I did for the project. I can take immigration statistics or battle fatalities and show how each side differed or the different years. I really liked Tableau, although at first it was rather challenging to use, I think once I was able to get the hang of it, the website was very useful and very interesting.
For a little I decided to play around with Word Clouds and see what they were like. They were very interesting too, but I did not think they were best for my website. I wanted to portray a more professional layout for my website and I think the Word Cloud did not portray that. It was interesting to see what were the most common countries popping up or the names coming up in the census. It is definitely a good tool for someone who is teaching and wants to show what words pop up the most in maybe a book the class was reading or something along those lines.
Overall, I think data visualizations are a great tool to use to get your information across and do it in a way that is more interesting than just a paper. I will definitely be coming back to this as time goes on.
