Note: I’m a graduate student at the University of Miami working on my capstone, a visualization of the Pictures of the Year International Archives. If you’re curious about my journey, here are my posts tagged with capstone.
Well, it’s roughly mid-semester and I feel like I haven’t made much progress though I’ve been working non-stop acquiring data and manually fixing errors as much as I am able. In my excitement, I proposed a project that is probably more than what can be done in just a few months. Given I’m a one-woman band and its been established that there’s quite a bit of missing data, analyzing the entire POYi archives — photos, text and numbers — won’t be feasible in the time I have left.
Two Paths
- Focus on 10 or 20 years (which years, to be determined) and go deep; meaning: look at gender, color analysis, text analysis, similarity, etc.
- Focus on gender because it is the one variable that has a low percentage of missing data.
I’m more excited about the first than the latter but what concerns me about going deep is that each one of those types of analysis could become huge. I would want to learn the process Nicholas Rougeux took to analyze colors of the New Yorker and for similarity, I would learn the process outlined by the Yale Humanities Lab. In fact, I already started testing (see gif below) but the next steps require some serious brainpower (focus), and honestly, the coronavirus is making me a bit crazy and news-obsessed.
Practical Path
So, the ambitious side of me needs to chill which means I’ll go with path 2 and focus on gender. It’s realistic, I think. But I still need to determine what the time period will be and for how long. Ten years seems too little. Twenty seems like a good timeframe. I want a time period where there might be some great context to the charts.
My big concern is that an analysis on demographics might be too boring. Who wants to be boring??? If there was information about race or ethnicity, that could be more interesting but alas, there is not.
Time to not worry about it and just move forward.