DATA VISUALIZATION PROJECT

Start by selecting one of the years displayed on the timeline. Like a typical timeline, our timeline has dots representing years. Unlike a typical timeline, the size of our timeline's dots directly correlates to the number of items that College Women has made available within that year. Beneath your selected year will appear a word cloud of subjects for all the items from that year. The subject that has the highest number of items appears the largest and so on.

Our data visualization project compiles data from the College Women portal and reframes it to visualize content by year and subject matter. Users can investigate individual years or get a sense of the prevalence of content across years.

As individual undergrads with varying stages of coding experience, we were tasked with the creation of a data visualization that would serve as an aid to the College Women portal. After coming to consensus on what we wanted the visualization to show, we divided the work into individual tasks. We then assigned each task to a team member based on what made sense. The first step of our project consisted of collecting the dataset from College Women by webscraping metadata using BeautifulSoup--learning some Python through the process. After webscraping the dataset, Lead Developer Mimi Benkoussa used OpenRefine to clean the data accumulated from the portal. Shortly after, Data Specialist Nathália Santos was in charge of creating the word cloud with the clean data. For the website itself, Web Designer Claudia Zavala crafted the design using Photoshop and Canva. Front-End Developer Madeline Perry worked closely with Claudia Zavala in transforming the mockup into the website interface through HTML and CSS. Mimi Benkoussa also spearheaded the creation of the timeline. The team worked collaboratively using JQuery and Javascript to connect the interactive elements like the timeline and WordCloud to the website.

We want to help make the past a little more present with our interactive visualization. By using this tool in tandem with the College Women site, we hope users can make connections among the photos, scrapbooks, diaries, and correspondence collected. We sought to make this visualization accessible and intuitive for those curious about the history of historically women's colleges. On a personal level, we all gained coding experience and learned a lot through the process.

The College Women portal compiles photos, diaries, scrapbooks, and correspondence from women enrolled at historically women's colleges within the last two centuries. Feel free to go directly to the College Women Open Access Portal to browse through the collections.

OpenRefine was used to clean up the metadata. This information includes item date, format, location, and description, as well as the subjects associated with that item. All changes made are listed in the Dataset Documentation. While we are releasing the cleaned dataset in its entirety, only the “Date” and “Subject” categories were used for the Digital Scholarship Summer Fellows Data Visualization Project.

• Download the data
• Download the data set documentation as a PDF or plain text file

Special thanks to Bryn Mawr College LITS, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for supporting this program. The Digital Scholars Summer Fellows program data visualization is built on code by Eric Coopey, Jason Davies, and Ritesh Kumar.