For my project, I decided to look at the census data from two separate websites pertaining to approximately the same tribal area in Oklahoma. One was specifically for tribal areas and one was non-tribal based, I also doubt they would use the exact same border to define the spaces within the state. Getting this data together was a little more difficult than I originally thought because I wanted to make sure that I was getting the right kind of information in terms of year and race demographic, this led to a lot of double-checking to make sure the data that needed to line up would line up as best as possible. It was also difficult to figure out what kind of chart would work best to represent this specific data. I’m a little disappointed in how some of the data barely shows up on the chart because the way the numbers are measured makes the smaller numbers basically invisible, that may just be an unavoidable part of making some charts but I almost wanted more time to mess around with the different kinds of charts and what they may be best used for. For my research question for this chart, I wanted to look at the difference between how tribal-centric census charts are made versus non-tribal. There seems to be a noticeable difference between how much land is considered official tribal territory and I also noticed some differences between how they counted races, especially mixed-race people. The non-tribal chart went into more categories of how someone could be mixed race while the tribal one did not. Also, both of the census data used for each chart seem to be from the same ACS 2021 5-year census data so interesting how two websites using the same data can have different ways of showing their results and what it prioritizes. The tribal-based data website also seems to be created from a branch of the official US census and I am curious about how it was created and how much involvement the census has over those who update the tribal information. I would also like to know how many people working on the tribal information are indigenous and how many are not.
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Lua– this is such an interesting representation of the data you found, and you ask so many critical questions. I also find it intriguing that the “My Tribal Area” data offers a deeper look into a variety of categories whereas the “Census Reporter” data does not. As we can see from your graph, there is a major discrepancy between the numbers. To me, this raises additional questions about the methods and how this data was curated in the first place.
There is a way to adjust the Y-axis scale of the graph, which may help balance out the visual so that the Census Reporter Data doesn’t look so small. On Flourish, go to “Y axis”, navigate to the section called “Ticks and Labels”, and check the “styling box.” This will open up additional options and a section called “Ticks to Show.” Here, you can set the mode to either number (the total of numbered labels on the Y axis), or custom (where you can set your own number labels, one per line).
As you describe, this data visualization can help us think about different kinds of research questions. It is also clear that we cannot rely on the quantitative data alone, and would have to look to other sources to help us better understand this area and the people who live there!