Part 3. FLOAT Case Studies
3.5 300 African American Titles
Beginning with a Dataset of 300 African American Texts
Project Rationale: This project charts the mentions of works by Black writers across publications and search engines. This examination focuses on 300 and tabulates and ranks novels based on an accumulation of citations in thousands of articles. The texts were selected from my own interests and knowledge of major, recurring topics in our field as well as works frequently cited by our friends and colleagues. Thus, while many of the texts that appear in this are deemed canonical, some were selected for personal and arbitrary reasons.
Data Story Description:This visualization is based on a dataset of 300 African American literary texts and their rates of mentions between 1980 – 2019 across five databases: JSTOR, Project Muse, ProQuest, Google Scholar, and the online archives for The New York Times. The bigger the bubble size, the higher the score for the text (and number of mentions).
Formulate – A Research Question
Exploratory Question:
- How can we rank the scholarly significance of Black texts?
Explanatory Question (I revised my research questions during the analyzing process):
- What works are have the most citations?
- What decades were these works originally published?
- What genres are included in the dataset?
- What is the gender ratio of writers included in the dataset?
Locate – A Data Source
For this project, I used 300 Key African American Literary Texts. This pre-assembled dataset is published on the subverse of the Texas Data Repository. The “Black Studies Data Verse” has datasets related to an assortment of topics in Black literature and Black studies in general. The information is already cleaned and organized in a coherent manner.
You can access this information by going to this website here.
Organize – Your Data
This information already came organized. It has a data dictionary that explains the organization and components of the dataset. The dataset has 23 main categories: Book title, Author, Gender, Publication Year, Publication decade, JSTOR ,Project Muse, ProQuest, Google Scholar, NYTimes, Weighted Score B, Genre, Number of Words in Title, Birthplace/Origin 1, State, Region, Country, Birthday, Birth Year, Birth Decade, Death Date, Death Year, Death Decade;
The structure of the dataset is defined in the accompanying data dictionary.
Analyze – Your Data
I used Tableau Public to analyze my data.
Tell— A Data Story
Pre-Step: Gathering the Data
- Go to the Texas Data Repository
- Search “300 Key African American Literary Texts
- Download the option that is called comma separated values
- Separated Values)
- Open tableau then drag and drop your dataset into the software
- Or you can go to Connect on the left bar and select the kind of file you have and upload your dataset that way
- Make Sure tableau read your data right and correct categories if they were read wrong
- PUBLICATION year should be a string along with decade
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