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Underpitched & underpublished
I was discussing the state of racial inequality in CA versus MN with my dad, and I sent him this November 2024 article on The Worst States for Black Americans as support for my arguments. For this project, I spent a couple of hours extracting the data, converting it to a spreadsheet, and turning those spreadsheets into charts and visualizations to put in perspective how my state is treating me.
Let’s count our blessings with facts and logic!
Read moreThis Story of the Data of my Stories will cover the construction of a dashboard for my thesis, a middle-grade novel that necessitated a lot of research into California flora & fauna.
Read moreIt’s time for Part 2 of my Story Data Story Black Onomastics trilogy. We’re still covering my collection, organization, and analysis of data regarding Black names.
I decided to work with the names from The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases after all, and this meant adding another 60,000+ entries before I cleaned it, resulting in 67,030 entries and 48296 unique names.
I’ve ended up with a Google spreadsheet that has 7 sheets with over 123,125 rows and a total of 66,565 unique names. Is there any wonder I want more power to shift through this?
In any case, I want to answer as many of my questions as I can with the spreadsheet as it is and then move the data into Tableau so I can compare it with US Census name data going back to 1880. The finale will hopefully have chord diagrams and other cool visualizations.
Read moreI’m digging into my process of collecting and organizing meaningful Black names, whether that’s from scraping Wikipedia pages or studying the US Census.
I originally started these lists with the question of “What are the characteristics of diasporic African American names and how do they compare with African names versus colonizer/ European-American names?”
Or in short,
This is the first of several posts covering the story of how I assemble and utilize data for creative projects. In this case, I’ll look at the spreadsheet where I store the data of prospective, in-progress, and on-submission stories and ideas.
Most of my professional content will be hosted on my GitHub portfolio but I thought my blog was as good a place as any to practice a bit of data storytelling!
I aim to share a few data storytelling posts here in the future to explain some of the more complex spreadsheets I’ve created, but I want to introduce this career transition by sharing images of some of my earliest worldbuilding spreadsheets (dating from roughly 2005~2011). It’s from a project where people can enter dreams a la Paprika or Inception. I won’t be sharing more information than that, but if you’re like me, the data itself will pique your interest and inspire your imagination.
Read moreThis is the final placeholder post that may later be about the process/story of how I assembled and utilized data for one of my creative projects—in this case, the spreadsheets where I rank literary magazines according to who they published, how often they publish award-winning work, and other information.
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