For the next week, we are planning on working hard on cleaning our data to the point that it is in a usable format for the mapping program. As the association, we had planned to make between Alumni location and Major ended up not panning out, we are working on achieving a replacement data set. For the new data, we are contacting the Archives and Athletic departments asking for old sports team rosters.
By next weekend we should be able to input our data into the mapping software and examine the results.
Hi,
I note that you’ve been encountering difficulties obtaining certain variables, but I’m not sure I found which variables you have found yet.
I imagine you’re looking for student-level data containing Name (although probably private), Hometown (or Nationality), Year Graduated, and Major (although I understand that’s difficult). If you had access, what other variables would you like to have?
If you don’t get student-level data, you might end up getting class-level data. In that case, I guess you’d want values for student body makeup by nationality/hometown and by major.
Do you have any of these? Your project looks cool – I’m looking forward to the finished result.
We have been able to find some student-level data, for example, everything contained in the zoo bookes: first name, last name, hometown, state, and high school.
What we are haveing difficulty with at the moment is drawing and interesting the connection between in individual factors. What we had planned on doing was associating location information (such as town or state) with major information via the coupling of the student’s names and then watching how the patterns change over time. However, as names are private we have not been able to gain access to any data sets that have major linked to name (other than the Alumni database).
What information we have received pertaining to majors is linked to year, however, is not locationally linked and thus is for our purposes un-mappable (I did end up using it for my tutorial video, see post).
So instead of trying to scratch the information out of the Alumni database, we have simply decided to move to a different comparative variable, ie. Sports team affiliation.