At the gentle urging of Mauricio, I’ve decided to dedicate my time landlocked and bored in Florida to conquering my fear of data visualisations. I’ve spent all year completely overwhelmed, wondering how I went from a master’s in political sociology to a master’s that involved DATA of all things, but I did it! I used Batchgeo and I have a map!
Batchgeo is wonderful and simple to use. Copying/pasting data is quite possibly the most fool-proof way of creating maps I could conceive of, yet it took quite a while to compile the data into a digestible spreadsheet as the US Department of Education site is inexplicably down. I’ve spent all year terrified of data visualisations because they always seemed so complex – visualisations are great for the average reader, but seem like a huge pain in the butt for the average journalist. This map won’t win me any Pulitzers but it’s a start. Clearly I’ll have to take baby steps as I inch ever closer to the final project, but starting with top-1o lists is not a horrible way to go.
I’ve got a few questions about the dataset itself, though. Does University of Texas represent the entire statewide UT system of universities, or just UT Austin, the flagship campus? Same for the other state universities on the map, Minnesota and Penn State. Also, the list is probably a bit imbalanced as state universities tend to have tens of thousands more students than private colleges, which the DOE might not have taken into consideration. I guess a good data journalist has to be highly critical of the data before mapping it.
Frankly, I’m just amazed that the University of Miami isn’t on the list. Go Canes?
