A Hiatus Hopes to Conclude Soon ~ Data Analysis Quickie!

I was discussing the state of racial inequality in CA versus MN with my dad, and I sent him this November 2024 article on The Worst States for Black Americans as support for my arguments. For this project, I spent a couple of hours extracting the data, converting it to a spreadsheet, and turning those spreadsheets into charts and visualizations to put in perspective how my state is treating me.

Let’s count our blessings with facts and logic!

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A Hiatus Continues? ~ What I'm reading ~

My perfectionist behind has finally completed the Google Data Analytics capstone and it can be seen here or here as well as my GitHub portfolio. This project makes it look like I can code in Python, but I don’t yet believe that. I need to take another course to be sure.

Similarly, while the Google cert hypothetically taught me R, I want to do another project or take another class until I believe I can use it.

That said, I've completed enough courses on Tableau that I’m three-fourths done with my next cert!

I’ll be keeping my completed homework assignments on my Tableau Public page with the assumption that there’s nothing wrong with transparency as you learn.

I find Tableau quite fun! I plan to add more projects with greater style, complexity, and skill. Likely, the rest of the SDStories will be hosted here. I’ve long known what kind of visualizations I want to use (sankey, chord, dumbbell chart, dendrogram/tree, etc…). Now that Tableau is becoming intuitive to me, I feel like I’ll be able to do these more quickly.

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A Hiatus

It's been a while! I'm just going to give you an update before I say goodbye for a couple weeks or months.

On the data analytics front, I recently completed a SQL certificate with honors. I had started to doubt my skills in SQL, so completing this course was useful for me to reaffirm my knowledge. I still need to develop a project that will let me show off my SQL abilities on my resume.

Secondly, I've started a different course focused on Tableau. I similarly have been doubting my Tableau skills so I wanted to take the course focusing on data visualization. I ended up signing up for the entire 8-course certificate (I'm 3/8ths through!) so let's work this big ole brain and see how quickly I can finish it—and with an A, of course.

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In any case, the writing and the job search are currently battling for highest priority in my life while data analytics will take a backseat until I feel more economically stable.

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Story Data Story Two: Black Name Analysis part 2: Prepare, Process, Analyze

It’s time for Part 2 of my Story Data Story Black Onomastics trilogy. We’re still covering my collection, organization, and analysis of data regarding Black names.

I decided to work with the names from The Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American slave trade databases after all, and this meant adding another 60,000+ entries before I cleaned it, resulting in 67,030 entries and 48296 unique names.
I’ve ended up with a Google spreadsheet that has 7 sheets with over 123,125 rows and a total of 66,565 unique names. Is there any wonder I want more power to shift through this?

In any case, I want to answer as many of my questions as I can with the spreadsheet as it is and then move the data into Tableau so I can compare it with US Census name data going back to 1880. The finale will hopefully have chord diagrams and other cool visualizations.

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Story Data Story Two: Black Name Analysis part 1: ASK

I’m digging into my process of collecting and organizing meaningful Black names, whether that’s from scraping Wikipedia pages or studying the US Census.
I originally started these lists with the question of “What are the characteristics of diasporic African American names and how do they compare with African names versus colonizer/ European-American names?”

Or in short,

“What makes a Black name Black?”

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