Regular readers will know how I do quite like to dabble with visual analysis, so here are a couple of doodles with some of the university fees data that is starting to appear.
The data set I’m using is a partial one, taken from the Guardian Datastore: Tuition fees 2012: what are the universities charging?. (If you know where there’s a full list of UK course fees data by HEI and course, please let me know in a comment below, or even better, via an answer to this Where’s the fees data? question on GetTheData.)
My first thought was to go for a proportional symbol map. (Does anyone know of a javascript library that can generate proportional symbol overlays on a Google Map or similar, even better if it can trivially pull in data from a Google spreadsheet via the Google visualisation? I have an old hack (supermarket catchment areas), but there must be something nicer to use by now, surely? [UPDATE: ah – forgot this: Polymaps])
In the end, I took the easy way out, and opted for Geocommons. I downloaded the data from the Guardian datastore, and tidied it up a little in Google Refine, removing non-numerical entries (including ranges, such 4,500-6,000) in the Fees column and replacing them with minumum fee values. Sorting the fees column as a numerical type with errors at the top made the columns that needed tweaking easy to find:
The Guardian data included an address column, which I thought Geocommons should be able to cope with. It didn’t seem to work out for me though (I’m sure I checked the UK territory, but only seemed to get US geocodings?) so in the end I used a trick posted to the OnlineJournalism blog to geocode the addresses (Getting full addresses for data from an FOI response (using APIs); rather than use the value.parseJson().results[0].formatted_address construct, I generated a couple of columns from the JSON results column using value.parseJson().results[0].geometry.location.lng and value.parseJson().results[0].geometry.location.lat).
Uploading the data to Geocommons and clicking where prompted, it was quite easy to generate this map of the fees to date:
Anyone know if there’s a way of choosing the order of fields in the pop-up info box? And maybe even a way of selecting which ones to display? Or do I have to generate a custom dataset and then create a map over that?
What I had hoped to be able to do was use coloured proportional symbols to generate a two dimensional data plot, e.g. comparing fees with drop out rates, but Geocommons doesn’t seem to support that (yet?). It would also be nice to have an interactive map where the user could select which numerical value(s) are displayed, but again, I missed that option if it’s there…
The second thing I thought I’d try would be an interactive scatterplot on Many Eyes. Here’s one view that I thought might identify what sort of return on value you might get for you course fee…;-)
Click thru’ to have a play with the chart yourself;-)
PS I can;t not say this, really – you’ve let me down again, @datastore folks…. where’s a university ID column using some sort of standard identifier for each university? I know you have them, because they’re in the Rosetta sheet… although that is lacking a HESA INST-ID column, which might be handy in certain situations… ;-) [UPDATE – apparently, HESA codes are in the spreadsheet…. ;-0]
PPS Hmm… that Rosetta sheet got me thinking – what identifier scheme does the JISC MU API use?
PPPS If you’re looking for a degree, why not give the Course Detective search engine a go? It searches over as many of the UK university online prospectus web pages that we could find and offer up as a sacrifice to a Google Custom search engine ;-)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 