Out of curiosity, I updated the school outbreak-associated cases map to reflect the data as reported by the Maryland Health Department on September 15, 2021.
After my experiment using smaller dot sizes, I updated this map to also have the smallest dot sizes. I think it is easier to read.
These charts shows the student level: freshman, sophomore, junior, senior, or unclassified of students that transfer from Maryland community colleges to University System of Maryland institutions. According to the notes on the data by the University System of Maryland, the transfers are the number of undergraduates enrolled for the first time at the institution with known prior undergraduate post-secondary experience. The students may or may not have transferred credit.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level, Fiscal 2020
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level, Fiscal 2020
I found code for a drill-down sunburst chart on Amchart’s website. I just popped in the data I had already typed up that has Bowie State Univesity spring 2021 headcount enrollment by area of origin. This version is kind of nice because you can drill down to see the details of the smaller categories. A disadvantage is that you can not see the drill-down categories until you drill down. In the future, I may be able to figure out how to show the hidden layers, but I am not sure if that will be an advantage, it might be too close together to see the categories well.
To drill down to a level click on the pie slice. This will expand the slice to the entire area of the pie. It is rather difficult to explain, it is easier to just play with the chart down below to understand how it operates.
The drill-down sunburst chart goes down to the level provided in the original data. For in-State students, the data shows to the county level the area of origin. For out-of-state students, it shows students from the major surrounding states and the District of Columbia. The states are New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The remaining students are from other states, “foreign”, or of unknown origin.
To make the other sunburst chart look cleaner I divided the counties into five regions: Capital Region, Central Maryland, Southern Maryland, Western Maryland, and Eastern Shore. The regions and the counties assigned to each region are from the “Visit Maryland” website. For this semester Bowie State University had no students from Western Maryland counties, so that region is not on the chart. As with the other charts, I withhold judgment on the chart until I have an opportunity to play with it.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, headcount by area of origin
Since I was able to get the sunburst chart to finally work properly. I decided to take a look at the data I entered. For some reason, the enrollment for winter 2021 is really low (COVID and short term?), so I decided to pull numbers of a more typical term (still COVID) to get a better idea of actual enrollment. I wrote the code in a text file, so I have not yet taken a look at the chart. However, I know from just looking at the data that Prince George’s County has the highest headcount enrollment. This is logical because Bowie State University is located in Prince George’s County.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, headcount enrollment by area of origin
In my last post, I said that I could not get the Sunburst Chart to render properly out of CodePen. I walked away with plans to go to bed. Getting ready for bed I did a few minutes of googling and found a Reddit post from three years ago that explained my issue. Apparently, since it was running locally I need to add “https:” prior to the resources in the HTML part of the code.
Below I have quoted partly how it was explained on the Reddit post. Basically, without the https:, which is sometimes assumed and can be assumed when it is running off CodePen, the computer does not know what it looking at. Thus, my code will not render. Since I am new to this and kind of just trying to make things work, I will be adding in the “https:”
Quabourter
…when you don’t use an explicit scheme, then your brower will use the scheme of your page. … This is also why this gave you problems when running locally: if your page is served under file:///some/path/to/your/file.htlm then the url// mascdn.bootstraphcdn.com/font-awesome/4/2.0/css/font-awesome.min.css resolves to file://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/fount-awesome/4.2.0/css/font-awesome.min.css, which doesn’t exist. …
When I was running the code without the “https:”, it would just spin its wheels. There was no error code.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS
I need to type in all my data before I can decide if I like a chart. The Sunburst chart is kind of interesting, it allows for drilling down of data, which I really like. The issue with the particular chart is that there is so much data the chart is kind of difficult to read. In my first version, I did not have the in-State enrollment divided by region and it was even harder to read.
Again I have run into the issue of not being able to get an Amcharts graphic to render on my site. I can make it render in CodePen, but when I export the “pen” it will not render locally. I also can not get it to render using the WordPress plugin for Amcharts. So I am going to park this here until I can figure out why I can not get it to render.
See the Pen amCharts 4: Sunburst Diagram with my data and regions no zero by Caroline (@New-Fish) on CodePen.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS
I made two maps about Maryland virtual learning programs for the 2021-2022 school year using data presented by the Maryland State Department of Education at the July 27, 2021 meeting of the State Board of Education. I appreciate that MSDE collected detailed data, but I found it difficult to process and understand. So, I made a map.
The first thing I did was separate the data into two maps: 1) elementary school and 2) middle and high school. I did this because this was the major divide in most counties about virtual learning program offerings.
I did my best to accurately portray the data published by MSDE, but I did make some assumptions and judgment calls. Sometimes it was not 100% clear about the meaning of the responses, so I did my best. I also errored on the side of simplicity because this is a graphic that is intended to give a basic idea of what is happening, not an essay.
In map form, it is much clearer that nine counties do not have any virtual learning programs in 2021-2022 for K-5 students. Four additional counties only offer virtual learning opportunities for certain (upper elementary) grades. Ten counties and Baltimore City offer virtual learning programs for grades K-5. I almost just wrote, all K-5 students, but that would not be accurate. Most jurisdictions restricted access to the program. Most jurisdictions had a set number of enrollments for each grade.
The map shows that two counties do not offer any virtual learning programs for middle and high school students and an additional county only offers virtual programs for sixth-grade students. I believe that Howard County only offers a virtual program for sixth-grade students because generally students in seventh grade and are above are 12 and over and eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Nine counties on the Eastern Shore will be offering virtual learning programs through the Eastern Shore of Maryland Educational Consortium. I believe that the consortium will be using APEX as a vendor. In addition the consortium, two Eastern Shore will also be offering their own blended virtual program to middle and high school students. Further, eleven counties and Baltimore City will be offering blended virtual programs to their middle and high school students.
I added in the private schools for the September 8, 2021 data release about outbreak-associated cases in schools and then mapped it. This map shows Maryland public and private schools with outbreak-associated cases on September 8, 2021, as defined by the Maryland Health Department. Information about the trend of the number of cases at each school from September 1, 2021, is shown in the tooltips. As for the public schools, my Excel “database” should be ready for the next release of data on September 15, 2021. And I should be able to quickly create a number of related maps. I may choose to make a color-coded trend map like I did for the public schools for the September 8, 2021 data.
As with the other map I googled the addresses for the private schools. Then Datawrapper mapped the schools. I assume based on my knowledge of the locations of some of the schools that the locations are generally correct, but I have not checked them. These maps are only for my own learning about the software and data visualization. I am trying to get a sense of which type of data visualizations are most useful and engaging. After I make the maps and visualizations I test interacting with them on my computer, tablet, and phone. I have found that some data visualizations behave differently on different devices.
I learned how to add specific colors to an Amcharts treemap. Green indicates an increase of transfer students from that institution to the University of Maryland College Park from fiscal 2019 to fiscal 2020. Red indicates a decrease and gray steady. Not groundbreaking, but it did take a while to figure out how to do the coding and then type it all in. Not sure if this is a good or bad way to visualize the data. Like with most of these graphics, first I need to build it and live with it a while before I can judge it.
I am also not sure if it is good or bad for students from particular institutions to increase or decrease. I just used red and green because it is easy to remember.
In the future, I would probably have a range of greens and reds to indicate the scale of the increase or decrease. For today I could not decide if I should code by number or percent, so I did nothing. Also, I am still trying to figure out how to “lighten” a color in Amcharts. I could just type in a different hex color, but that takes the fun out of learning how to do the coding for Amcharts.
To get this to work I needed to add a variable called “color”. I did this by typing “chart.dataFields.color = “color”;” I then wrote “color: “red” (or whatever color) for each institution. According to the documentation by Amcharts you can use many types of systems to set the colors, from just typing the name as I did to the hex color system.
Here are the ways to add color according to Amcharts.
am4core.color(“#ff0000”);
am4core.color(“#f00”);
am4core.color(“rgb(255, 0, 0)”);
am4core.color(“rgba(255, 0, 0, 0.5)”);
am4core.color({ r: 255, g: 0, b: 0 });
am4core.color(“red”);
Color-coded treemap of students that transfer to the University of Maryland College Park in fiscal 2020 compared to fiscal 2019. It seems to me that the coding, by the University System of Maryland in particular for the out-of-state students changed between fiscal 2019 and 2020. Also they only show the details for the top 15 institutions in any category.
Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS Transfer Students FY 2019 and FY 2020
The Maryland Health Department published updated numbers today, so I decided to see how long it would take me to update the map. Because I set up my spreadsheet properly it did not take very long. I just popped in the new case information and then exported it to the map. I used the NCES School Directory. Two schools were not in the directory, Blue Heron Elementary, which I added to the database, and the Success Program, which I did not add.
Since this map only shows schools with active cases, many of the schools with “decreasing” cases are not shown on the map. The Maryland Health Department list includes private schools. This map only shows public schools because I have a spreadsheet with public school addresses already set up. Private schools could be added if I spent the time to look up each address. I have not fully checked the map yet as I am just experimenting with the capabilities and my database skills.
As a note, some school systems’ first day of school is September 8, 2021.
