Project Assignment 1

Outline and Sources

Overview

The purpose of this assignment is to come up with a plan for your final project. The final project is going to involve creating a dashboard in Tableau. You can find some examples of Tableau dashboards here.

For the next few weeks you are going to work with members of your group to come up with a proposed plan for your report. You will first write an outline of your plan (this assignment) and then write a proposal that will flesh out the details.

The topic of your proposal and the Tableau dashboard should be related to of the topics that we cover during the course (democracy and development, women’s empowerment, clientelism, the welfare state, etc.).

So the first thing to do is to have a look at the syllabus and see what topic most appeals to you.

Steps

  1. Choose a topic.
  2. Find a dataset to work with.
  3. Gather sources relevant to your topic and generate a preliminary bibliography.
  4. Write an outline for a proposal describing the need for and purpose of your Power BI report.

What to Submit

You will submit a one-page outline along with a preliminary bibliography. Your outline will consist of the following parts:

  1. A 100 word abstract outlining the importance of your topic and the need for further analysis of it.
  2. A statement of the specific problem to be addressed by your research and analysis.
  3. Background information regarding the problem that you have identified.
  4. The proposed analysis, which should consist of two elements:
    1. a description of the data you will analyze; and
    2. a description the visualizations you plan to include.

For the dataset, be sure to identify one that is complete and includes both a cross-sectional as well as a time series component, e.g. data that spans across countries or regions and time.

For the visualizations, you should describe at least four: a bar chart, a line chart, a scatter plot and a map. You don’t have to do the visualizations yet, but be specific in terms of what your plan is for them.

Your outline can be in the form of short paragraphs or bullet points.

Please upload your assignment as a .pdf document to Blackboard. You will find the link to upload the assignment in the Assignments section of the Blackboard site.