i visited CERA this week to gain a better understanding of what happens at CERA and the different projects and prescribed burns that occur. it was a very educational experience and i would like to thank Jake and Emily for agreeing to take me out there. i have also started learning how to use storymaps and using the outline Jake created to help guide my creation of the website (and categorization of activities).
this week’s training was with excel. though i am relatively familiar with the program, i hadn’t learned how to create or use PivotCharts. at first, we used AutoSum on some fields. it is a great way to do calculations fast but has basically no effect on fields with text based content as there aren’t any operations to perform on it.
the training then directed us to create PivotCharts. i was able to create the first chart that compared the average ages of male and female householders:
as well as another one comparing the average age of either a male or female householder and the value of their personal estate:
you could also created different shaped pivot charts but i feel as though ones solely based on fields like the last names of householders would not reveal much information about the database.
the bar and line chart visualizations are the best way to view a large amount of the data at a glance and often offer a more direct comparison and trend analysis. any other is highly dependent on what information is required and the database provided. In this case, it ended up cluttering the chart and making the information a lot harder to understand, which, as stated earlier, had the effect of not revealing much.
over the next week, i hope to get more work done on the project, get some photos of the prescribed burns at CERA, and work on the omeka trainings.
⋆˙⟡ steph