INTRODUCTION

By some, education is considered a doorway to success in life, such as it allows upward mobility to one’s socioeconomic status, more opportunities in one’s life, and a higher chance of one being healthier. However education in the United States is a multifaceted subject, in which multiple factors related to location and regional demographics impact the value of the education received by an individual. 

Focusing on the United States, education is largely managed on a state level with each state having their own way of managing and measuring the success of their education system. California is the most populous state, but most importantly shares similar physical and qualitative characteristics as New York, especially in the area of education. This report will explore the various demographics captured by California in regards to its education system and visually outline what these factors look like from a geographic standpoint through Carto. It will also highlight insights related to questions about schooling options per county, funding structures available to schools, and much more.

INSPIRATION

There have been countless articles written on the state of education in the United States and within each state, but the primary inspiration for this visualization stems from Julie Mehertu’s artwork. Julie Mehertu is an Ethiopian painter whose art explores the lived experience and forces that impact it (i.e. migration, capitalism, climate change) through abstraction and architecture.

Currently the Whitney Museum of Art is showcasing her 20-year career through the Julie Mehertu exhibition. From her work’s oeuvre, her pieces from the late 1990s and early 2000s used cartographic designs and tools to discuss the topics of migration (Migration Direction Map, 1996) and climate change (Black City, 2007). Visually these pieces utilize the clean, fine lines typically associated with architecture design and vibrant bursts of color that insert an intentional chaos to each piece.

With my design, I wanted to precisely structure my data similar to Mehertu’s architectural background, in order for the audience to understand what behaviors or information that my data carries. Then I wanted to use vibrant colors to highlight data points, based on location, and group information together seamlessly in a visual manner.

MATERIALS

Carto: This tool is a full-stack geospatial platform that visualizes location data from either its own dataset collection or a new dataset uploaded by the user. This technology was used to create my draft and final visualizations, from structuring the dataset’s design format to stylizing the final design through color, borders, and label functionalities.

California Schools 2019 – 20: This public dataset showcases all the data points related to California’s public schools between the year of 2019 to 2020. The data points highlight the schools’ data about physical location (latitude and longitude), funding, district, county, and much more. For this report, the location data was the primary determinant of the cartograph and then the other data points painted the picture of each school’s overall state in that year. 

PROCESS

1. Find a multifaceted dataset. In order to create a visualization on Carto, the dataset needs to have spatial data and/or datapoints, such as the latitude and longitude of each value, in order to map out the geographical location properly. Then other additional data points need to be included or uploaded as well.

2. Navigate the data’s coding system. This public dataset had relatively straightforward labels, but there were a few values that required reviewing in the data’s codebook in order to determine whether its value and whether the data should be highlighted in the visualization.

3. Design the data story and structure layers based on this focus. This visualization was interested in exploring Carto as a tool to answer the above questions about the state of education in California from 2019 to 2020. Number of schools per county, funding per school, and aggregation based on school count were important data points that I thought the audience would want filtered out as an overview into the schools’ educational measurements. I either filtered these data points by creating a layer or adding a widget to view the trends on a microscale.

4. Determine the best visual design to emphasize the story’s narrative. Once the crucial data points were identified and filtered, I wanted to mimic the visual aesthetics of Mehertu’s pieces. Each layer has bursts of color and different geometric shapes to create an intentional chaos and separation between the data points. Then I built supplemental materials for the audience to zoom in on each school or overall data point, such as a legend, widget, and zoom-through-scroll functionality.

5. Publish design publicly. Once I felt the visualization was in a comfortable and final state, I wanted to share it with others and the public through Carto. I decided to share my cartograph as an embedded image so the audience can interact with Carto’s functionalities.

RESULTS

After my peer review, I decided to have two final visualizations related to this dataset and its narrative. The first visualization (above) was my initial attempt at utilizing color and the aggregation functionality to highlight the varying volumes of the number of schools in an area. However it was insightfully noted that school types with the highest volumes were overwhelming the visual oeuvre of the map and the colorful separation between school types could only be seen if the audience zoomed in.  

With that said, I took my reviewer’s advice in the second version and experimented with the blending options for the Aggregation layer as well as choose more contrasting colors between the two layers. Ultimately I decided to use the multiple option for the aggregation layer and this provided a heat map effect to the state from a bird’s eye view. But if the user zooms into the map, you will notice that the aggregation layer is a gradient blend of magenta and the schools’ locations are color-coded in color tones of blues and greens. Once zoomed in, the map looks like a colorful kaleidoscope and/or terrain for the user to engage with.

REFLECTION

As a first-time user of this visualization tool, the visualization was a pleasure to create and easy to design with this dataset. The available functionalities were user-friendly and easy to incorporate for the final design and illuminate the dataset’s insights. While I had no issues with the tool’s design capabilities, I would be curious to integrate other public datasets from California in the same year to further investigate other demographical relationships between the public schools dataset and other factors, such as taxpayer funding per county or school district. This additional information would add another layer of oversight into California’s educational system and what other factors should be considered when determining the value of education on a macro and micro level.