Project Assignment 2

Paper Draft

Overview

For this part of the project, you are going to write a rough draft of your paper that includes the visualizations that you want to use.

First you are going to need to download the data and wrangle it. “Wrangling” means cleaning the data and getting it into the proper format for analysis.

If you are working with more than one data set, then you have to merge the two data sets. I show you how to do all ofthis using data from the World Bank and V-Dem in this video. I would only recommend undertaking this chaallenge if you are very comfortable working with data.

Steps

  1. Download the data that you want to work with.
  2. Open the file in Excel’s Power Query Editor and see what the data look like.
  • Are the data in long format or will you need to reshape them?
  • How many years are there in the data and what will you need to filter out?
  • Which variables do you want to work with?
  1. If you want to work with more than one dataset, you will need to merge the two datasets if you want to display variables from the two datasets in the same visualization (like a scatter plot).
  2. Follow the steps discussed in class to clean the data and prepare it for analysis.
  3. Produce your basic data visualizations in Excel
Note

I recommend working with just a handful of variables for this assignment. You need at least two for the scatter plot. You can then choose whether you want to also display one or both of those in the other visualizations. If you have four visualizations in your report, then you should have a maximum of five variables. But just using two or three is also fine.

Paper Draft

Write a rought draft of your paper that includes the following elements:

  1. An abstract (\(\approx\) 150 words)
  2. A central argument or hypothesis
  3. A discussion of relevant literature
  4. A description of your data
  5. Your data visualizations
  6. A conclusion
  7. Reference list (include at least five sources)

Please take this opportunity to also note any problems that you had in cleaning the data and any unresolved questions about your data or analysis. It is better to admit your limitations and try to find a solution than to simply turn something in that is not going to work.

Along with your paper, please be sure to include a .csv or Excel file with your data.