Tag: Maryland

This map should be taken with a grain of salt. It is primarily a learning activity for me.

How I made this map

  1. Downloaded Anne Arundel Elementary School District Shapefile from Anne Arundel County Open Data website.
  2. Uploaded Files to MapShaper. Used MapShaper tools to simplify school districts so they will load faster. Exact boarders are not important for this map. Downloaded simplified Anne Arundel County Public Schools elemenary school districts.
  3. Uploaded simplified shapefile to Datawrapper. As a new choropleth map.
  4. Added data about Anne Arundel County Public School elementary school cases as of September 14, 2021 and reported on their data dashbaord. Not all elementary school districts had data listed. I entered no data went data was not reported. This results in a grayed out section of map. The “tooltips” do not work for these sectors. Alteratively I could enter “N/A” however when I tried that solutuion the areas ended up colored.
  5. Adjusted visualization on Datawrapper. Published map. Embeded map on this website.

Total Reported PubliC Elementary School Cases

Total cases represents active student and teacher/staff cases as of September 14, 2021.

Data NoTeS

These notes are taken from the Anne Arundel County Public Schools data dashboard.

1. The tables on this page reflect positive cases, confirmed by testing, with an onset date of September 8, 2021, or later that have been made known to Anne Arundel County Public Schools. Schools/Offices with zero student or staff cases do not appear in the tables. The data also includes cases of COVID-like symptoms in which a  person is not tested for a period of 48 hours after onset of symptoms, and probable cases, which occur when an individual with a COVID-like symptoms is found to have close contact with someone who is COVID-19 positive. Such cases are treated as if they are positive for COVID-19 in terms of identification of close contacts and potential exposures. Cases that appear on this dashboard and are later determined to be false positives or the like will be deleted in subsequent updates.

2. An “active case” is one in which the individual who tested positive is still under 10-day quarantine.

3. A positive case, COVID-like symptoms case, or probable case does not mean the individual exposed others at school or work, or that the individual contracted the virus at school or work.

4. Students enrolled in virtual-only learning and who are not part of any extracurricular activities are not included in this data.

5. Due to differences in reporting methodology, this information may not match the data presented by the Maryland Department of Health.

I learned how to create a map with only Anne Arundel County, which required me to find a JSON geofile of Anne Arundel County and convert it to the correct file format. It works, I hope I’m allowed to use the files I used to make the base map. I think I will be able to add other Anne Arundel County open data to the map in the future. I added the Anne Arundel County school-associated cases to the map to see if it rendered correctly. It does.

I’m not sure why the bottom of the map is cut off. I will have to explore that issue next.

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.

Treemap Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level, Fiscal 2020

Drill Down SunBurst Maryland Community College Transfer Students by Student Level

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.

Bowie State University Drill Down SunBurst CHart

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS, headcount by area of origin

Getting the COde to Render Locally

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.

SUnBurst Chart BOWIE STate Enrollment

Source: University System of Maryland, IRIS

Thoughts about SunBurst Chart

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.

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.

Elementary School Virtual Learning Programs 2021-2022

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.

Middle and High School Virutal Learning Programs 2021-2022

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.

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.

After my last map that shows public schools that have ever had an active outbreak, I got curious about what it would look like to just show schools with current active cases with trend information. Please see the notes for the data in the previous posts.

My kids return to school in person tomorrow so I have been thinking about public school-associated outbreaks all day and different ways to graph the data available.

This map shows schools that have had a school-associated outbreak on 25 August 2021 or 1 September 2021. The circle shows the max size of the outbreak. I first tried sizing by the 1 September 2021 outbreak size, but that eliminated the schools that had an outbreak on 25 August but had zero cases on 1 September. The color shows if the cases at the particular school are increasing, staying the same, or decreasing. The tooltips show the number of cases on each day and the “type” of school based on the NCES School Directory. The two cases at Success Program on 1 September in Frederick County is not recorded because it does not have an address in the NCES School Directory. I will have to decide whether to add the Success Program or to just footnote it.

I also have to decide if I want to add private schools in the future. I would need to look up the address for each private school.

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