Your final project will bring together the different technologies that we are learning. It will bring together your skills in building a web page and manipulating data that you have developed using spreadsheets. This website must have the following characteristics:
The final project is due at 10 pm on the second reading day, December 12. This is the day before your final exam.
An appropriate project is one for which you can find appropriate data and can identify questions of interest that you can answer but that are not already answered by the data. That does not mean that they need to be new research questions -- simply ones that you derive from your data. Multiple people can be working in the same area.
You may work in pairs for this project. If you want to work as part of a pair, you are to indicate that when you turn in the topic. If you do, the expectations are higher in terms of web size and amount of analysis.
What are good topics? There are lots of interesting areas available. Information about demographics, countries, cities, language, sports, and nutrition abound. You are apt to get into trouble if you try to focus in on too narrow an area. You are required to use data that is already available electronically and your data must come from at least 2 different sources.
Some of the topics from past semesters included relating health statistics to the number of fast food restaurants in a country, religion and birth statistics, country demographics and sports figures, health and literacy, and teacher salaries and county demographics.
My recommendation is to take a topic that you are interested in and imagine how to relate it to a broader perspective.
Countries
United States
North Carolina
Music
Sports
Food (as chains redo these pages, some years the conversion is easier or harder)
General
You are to post your chosen topic and the resources (specific URLs and specific descriptions if needed) that you will be using for the data on Sakai under "Final Project Topic." Please post it inline. If you are planning to work with a partner, that should be stated in the description. Both of you should post the same information.
You are to include a one-sentence description of the topic that you would like to use. The description should describe how you will attempt to relate the data and what message you intend to convey with your website. It is NOT a graded assignment, but we will be giving you feedback and confirm that the data is usable.
The topic is due November 29. It is not a graded assignment. The purpose of posting the topic is for me to give you feedback and for you to be sure that you will be able to find data to use.
You are to produce a spreadsheet that captures your data. The first step is to get the data that you will be using into spreadsheet format and to clean it to the point where it is usable. The two different sources should be on separate worksheets and should have enough comments on it for us to be able to understand what we are looking at.
You are to produce at least one analysis of each set of data. You MUST document on the spreadsheet what the analysis is doing. This can be as simple as the column or field title. This is to be submitted through Sakai when you submit the final project.
You are also to produce a table and graph of some sort to represent the interaction of the two sets of data. The graph should be well labeled and the choice of form should be appropriate for the data that you are showing.
If you are working with a partner, the requirements for this assignment are doubled: two analyses for each dataset and two tables and graphs.
What kind of analyses are we looking for? The goal is to learn something NEW from the analysis. At its simplest, an analysis may standardize data. For example, if your data has the number of people graduating from high school in a country and the country's population, you may want to convert this into the percentage of people with a high school education. If you have data about average income and education level, you may want to do a statistical test to see if the values are correlated. Remember that this is not a course about the data that you are processing. It is therefore alright to produce statistics that other people have looked at before. It is NOT alright to simply pick up those statistics.
Significant Digits: When you analyze your data, be sure to use appropriate levels of representation. With any data, the number of significant digits is critical. The number of significant digits is the number of digits believed to be correct by the person reporting the data. It is assumed to include one estimated digit. For rules and examples of dealing with significant digits, see Significant Digits.
The spreadsheet is to be turned at at the same time as the project and is to be posted to Sakai under the Final Project.
The final result of the project is a web site that presents your information. The web site should explain the topic that you are covering in an attractive and enticing way. The web page should be informative about what it will tell the visitor, explain why they should be interested, and have enough visual appeal that they want to be there.
The requirements for the website are very similar to those for the home page assignment. It is to be built using an external css stylesheet. You should have consistent navigation across the pages. Navigation must exist between pages and there should be easy, consistent navigation to different parts of the page. Your pages should have a consistent look and feel. I expect to see well-formatted HTML and CSS code.
There is only one required element on the pages: you are to include some javascript code. You may use it to present the date or have an interactive component. Embedding a widget is a nice touch, but does not meet this requirement.
Beyond that, there are no specific required elements on the pages; you are to use pieces that are appropriate to your message. Clearly you will need to have a table and images. You will be graded on using the appropriate tags for the different elements.
You will be graded on the consistency and navigation of the web pages. Navigation must exist between pages and there should be easy, consistent navigation to different parts of the page.
The web site is to display your table(s) and graph(s) in a pleasing manner.
I will be grading in terms of both content and style. For content, I am looking for a clear explanation of what the site is about and why it is interesting. Explanations should not assume any prior knowledge of the field.
If you are doing a one-person project, the minimum is a 3-page website and one set of data analysis. If there are two of you, it is 4 pages and two different sets of analysis (that is, look at data at least two different ways). The real goal is to present the needed content.
I will look at the following questions:
This site should be posted to a webpage on the UNC web space in a folder with the name of your choice. It should be a name that reflects the content of your web site. The first page of your website should be index.html. Thus, the page will be accessed as www.unc.edu/~onyen/FolderName. You are to post the url name of your site on Sakai under the final project. Post it as an inline submission.