Category: Chart Test

AmCharts has updated its library to version 5. AmCharts5 includes updates to their Venn diagram library. Since I love Venn diagrams I spent the morning figuring it out. I created the Venn diagram below to show HS completers. It took me a while to figure out the syntax. Overall I think I was mostly able to make it do what I wanted to do. However, I since haven’t figured out how to put a category entirely in another category. For example, I would like a big circle with all HS completers that includes HS graduates and HS certificate students.

The Venn diagram below is of Maryland public school students that completed high school. It shows the overlap of how the students that: (1) earned a completion certificate (for completing a special education program); (2) met the University System of Maryland (USM) requirements); (3) met the Career and Technical Education (CTE) requirements; and/or (4) met the regular diploma requirements. “Normal diploma” is just to indicate students that did not earn either a USM or CTE credentials in addition to their high school diploma. This is primarily for my own understanding of the data and to learn web-based data visualization techniques.

Now that I have made this visualization I am not sure if using a Venn diagram is better than a Sankey diagram for this data. I would also like to add additional information to the chart such as a title and to have the actual numbers displayed on the chart. As far as the data goes, I wish that I had information about the post-high school behavior of these different groups of students. According to this data, about 60.5% of high school completers met the USM requirements.

The colors used below are not intended to mean anything beyond looking nice. It took me a while to figure out the colors. Once I figured it out I just used a rainbow with my only intention to combine blue and yellow to make green.

StateWide High School CompLetion Venn Diagram

Source: Maryland State Department of Education, 2019 High School Completion

This is a test of a waterfall chart with negative numbers. This is just a test to see if I can recreate a waterfall chart I saw using Amcharts. I have linked the document with the original waterfall chart in the source below, the chart is on page 16 of the document. Initially had trouble with showing the final two bars because they went into negative numbers, but I was able to play around with the formatting to get it to display properly. As I note I do not have access to the underlying data, I used the displayed figures to produce the chart below. To completely recreate the chart I need to still figure out how to format the Y axis numbers. I need to add a “$” sign and truncate the numbers. I will research this and update once I figure it out.

ARP: American Rescue Plan

COLA: cost-of-living adjustment

IT: information technology

Source: Department of Legislative Services

Currently Quaranting

This chart shows the number of students and staff currently quarantining according to Anne Arundel County Public Schools (AACPS) COVID-19 data dashboard. The dashboard is currently being updated daily, but I have not been diligent about collecting the data daily; therefore there is data missing from some days. So far, according to the data I recorded, the number of students quarantining peaked at 1,756 on September 29, 2021. On that date, there were 40 staff members quarantining, which was also a high point.

Below I have copied what AACPS says about who is included in the number of students and staff currently quarantining.

The number of current quarantine cases above includes those who are COVID-19 positive through confirmed testing, those who have been designated as having COVID-like symptoms, and those who are probable cases as defined below on this page. It also includes those who have been determined to be close contacts of those persons and who are not fully vaccinated. The data includes cases traced in schools as well as those involving AACPS students that are traced in the community and have no immediate impact on schools.

Anne Arundel County Public Schools

THoughts about the Chart

I like that datawrapper provides several options for displaying the date at the bottom of a chart. Because I have taken foreign languages and lived abroad, I have used both the day/month/year date formate and the month/day/year formate. I find it sort of confusing switching between the format conventions, so I'm happy that there is an option that eliminates that potential confusion by using the month abbreviations as such "Sep" or "Oct" with the date number above. I find this date format easier to read.

I used the straight number of students and staff currently quarantining for this chart because I was interested in the actual numbers. I could also show the percentage of students and staff currently quarantining. I would need to find an accurate count of students and staff for the current school year to make that chart.

Keeping up with the COVID-19 data published by Anne Arundel County Public Schools on an individual school basis is not really sustainable because it is currently being published daily. The data can not be downloaded so it has to be transcribed by hand. So I am looking at some other ways to visualize the data that might be less time-intensive, and still informative. My primary goals are to 1) learn how to build various data visualizations, and 2) explore the utility of various data visualizations. Maintaining a data dashboard, unless I am curious about the data that day is not my primary purpose.

One idea is to look at the cumulative COVID-19 cases by both students and staff on a daily basis. I did not think to capture this data earlier, so I have a few days of data missing. I also have missing days because life got in the way. It doesn’t seem hard to enter in a few data points every day until you get wrapped up in life and then you realize that you haven’t even looked at the website in a few days. I wish that they published the data in a way that I could download their archival data, but I will take what they share. The Maryland Health Department publishes their archival school outbreak data; however, their data only reflects outbreaks (as they have defined them) and is only published once a week on Wednesdays. Because of the missing data, I used the step model of lines as I think it is a more honest way to show the data.

This line chart shows the cumulative daily COVID-19 cases for students and staff for the 2021-2022 school year. The number of cases are from the Anne Arundel County Public Schools data dashboard. I have added dots for the days that I recorded the published data. There are no dots on the days that I do not record the data.

The more visualizations I make the clearer it becomes that one of the major challenges of visualizing education data is that it is a very complicated system and it is difficult to simplify. For example, I made a visualization of student transfers from Maryland community colleges to Maryland public four-year institutions. This is only a portion of college transfers. It does not include transfers from public four-year institutions to other four-year institutions. It also does not include other segments of higher education institutions such as private four-year institutions or out-of-state institutions. There is not an easy way to simplify the data.

I made this data visualization using the “chord diagram with animated bullets” demo by amcharts. I just added in my data. The demo has 6 nodes, mine has 29. The good thing is that the nodes can be clicked off so that you can examine only specific nodes. For example, you could click off all but two of the community college to compare them.

Animated BUllet Chord Diagram of Student Transfers: Maryland Community Colleges to Maryland Public Four-year Institutions

Note: I just noticed when testing the post that this chart does not look great on mobile. It works better if you turn your phone to landscape mode. I am going to explore this further.

  • BSU=Bowie State University
  • CSU=Coppin State University
  • UB=University of Baltimore
  • UMBC=University of Maryland Baltimore County
  • UMCP=University of Maryland College Park
  • UMES=University of Maryland Eastern Shore
  • UMGC=University of Maryland Global Campus
  • SMCM=St. Mary’s College of Maryland
  • MSU=St. Mary’s College of Maryland
  • MSU=Morgan State University
  • UMB=University of Maryland, Baltimore
  • BCCC=Baltimore City Community College
  • CCBC=Community College of Baltimore County
  • CSM=College of Southern Maryland
  • MC=Montgomery College
  • PGCC=Prince George’s Community College

Source: Maryland Higher Education Commission: Undergraduate transfers among Maryland institutions of higher education 2019-2020, May 2021.

chord Diagram Student Transfers: Maryland Community Colleges to Maryland Public Four-year Institutions

Note: I just noticed when testing the post that this chart does not look great on mobile. It works better if you turn your phone to landscape mode. I am going to explore this further.

I removed the bullets to reduce the visual clutter. I think I like this version a little more, although I think that I can still make improvements. To improve it I stole the best elements from the “Who kissed who in Friends” chord diagram demo. I still think that I can make further improvements, but I need to explore the coding options a bit deeper to figure out what changes I would like to make. With this version, I may be able to add in the full names of the institutions in a future version.

This drill-down sunburst chart shows the breakdown of students that transferred to the University of Maryland College Park in fiscal 2020. The first layer shows the type of sending institution: Maryland Community Colleges; other University System of Maryland institutions; Maryland private institutions, including institutions that belong to the Maryland Univerity and College Association (MICUA); and out-of-state institutions. The second layer shows the institutions. However, since the original data source only shows the top institutions in a particular category, the names of not all out-of-state institutions are captured.

This chart is based on an Amcharts demo for a drill-down sunburst chart. This particular data only had two levels, but additional levels can be added if you have hierarchical data with multiple levels. As with several other charts I have tried making with Amcharts, this chart did not work in their add-in for WordPress. I however was able to add my data using Notepad. Then I saved the document as an HTML file by changing the file extension to .HTML. Then I uploaded the file to the media library for my website. Finally, I used some HTML code on this page to creat a frame and pull up the chart. I explained that process and shared the code I used in a previous post about my experiences making charts and maps with amcharts.

The chart shows that 63.6% of transfer students came from Maryland community colleges. Half (50.3%) of those students from Maryland community colleges came from Montgomery College, which is located in Montgomery County not far from UMCP. Anne Arundel Community College, Prince George’s Community College, and Howard Community College were also the source of a large number of transfer students. The second-largest source of transfer students is out-of-state institutions. For that category none of the sending schools are dominant. The biggest category is “other”.

UMCP Transfer Students in Fiscal 2020 Drill Down Sunburst Charth

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

I modified one of the Amcharts demos called map with curved lines to make a Maryland map with lines. I want to show how students transfer among colleges at universities in the state using a map. I have successfully created the base map, but I have not yet figured out how to add a stroke width to the lines. I think it would be interesting to have the thickness of the line represent the number of students that transferred. I want to see if location is a factor in transferring.

I have read through the Amcharts documentation, but I still can not figure out how to change the stroke width for each individual line. I did figure out how to change the width for all of the lines at the same time, but that is not what I want to do. I noticed when I made the lines thicker the map looked really messy, so this idea might not get off the ground even if I figure out the technical details. The issue is while I am pretty good at figuring out technical issues I do not have a strong foundation in using javascript libraries. I have an 11 hour YouTube video that I am planning on watching to build a stronger foundation, but I have not yet made the time to watch it. I keep on spending my time trying out new ideas on visualizing data. I have so many data visualizations I would like to build, I need more hours in the day to build them all. I hope I will get quicker with time

Maryland Map with Lines

If I decided to go this route I just need to take the time to enter the names and longitudes and latitudes of all of the institutions. For this map I just googled the institution and “longitude and latitude”; however, I just discovered the U.S. Department of Education College ScoreCard data download has longitude and latitude information. In the future I will try using the ScoreCard longitude and latitude information.

After taking another look, at my previous heatmap table about Anne Arundel County Public School COVID cases, I swapped out the school type information for the cluster type. I think that the average user would find the cluster information more useful.

I decided to see if I could make the Anne Arundel County Public School COVID-19 table I published yesterday a more usable table by eliminating schools with no active cases. I think it is prettier, but it might be less useful for people searching for their particular school.

Test of feeder system table.

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