NOTE: THIS IS HOW THE ASSIGNMENT READ IN CLASS TODAY...HOWEVER, THERE ARE SOME MODIFICATIONS NEEDED TO MAKE IT WORK. THAT INFORMATION FOLLOWS THE ORIGINAL ASSIGNMENT...
This assignment uses your skills in gathering data from the web, importing data into Excel, and designing and interpreting spreadsheets for journalistic uses. You may talk with others about the assignment, but students must each turn in their own paper.
You are doing a story about changes in kinds of employment within Iowa. After some web searching, you locate a spot at Iowa State University that has information about several different population trends. The URL is: http://www.profiles.iastate.edu/places/. Begin by finding state data on personal employment. Import this data into Excel using the techniques you've learned in class (note that you need to add an extra tab before the first year heading to import the data correctly.
One way to explore the data is to look at percent change in employment categories over time. Add this information to your spreadsheet for the period from 1980 to 1996. Another way is to find the proportion of employment in each category to the total number of employed people. You could do this for 1980 and 1996 and then compare the percentage points of change over time for job categories.
Think about this data for awhile and consider what stands out for a news story.
Now that you're done thinking, you'd like to compare Johnson County Data to that of the state. Go back to the URL where you started and find comparable data for Johnson County. Create a spreadsheet for Johnson County that matches the one you created for the state data (hint: you can add another worksheet to your Excel workbook rather than opening a new file and label each sheet at its tab on the bottom).
Think about the biggest contrasts and similarities between the county and the state.
Now address the following questions:
Be sure to hand in your answers to these questions, along with printouts of the two spreadsheets you created. The assignment is due in class on Monday, September 28.
Students...
It appears that the problem we had in class today has to do with differences between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Navigator reads spaces as spaces, while Explorer reads in tabs instead. I based the assignment on Explorer, which isn't what we use in the lab. One choice, then, is to simply use Explorer if you have it available. Then everything should work fine.
Another choice is to use a variation on the files, which I have placed on the class web site. State employment data and Johnson County employment data should work just fine for the instructions above.
A third way, and how I would do it, is to access the download version of the file from the Profiles web site. This file is in CSV format, which stands for "comma separated values." You'll see it mentioned at the bottom of the Profiles page. There are a few challenges to working with this data. First, you'll have to download the file, which you might not have done before. Second, the file is "zipped," which is a way of making files smaller that's common on Windows machines but not on Macs. You can, however, use a shareware program called "Zipit" that can be downloaded and then used to extract the file from the "archive." The third challenge to this approach is that the state and county data are combined in one large file, with each county coded by a FIPS number. You have to go to another place on the Profiles web site to get the list of county FIPS codes and names. Note: Anybody who goes through all this stuff in this paragraph to do the assignment and can document it, will receive one letter grade higher on the assignment (although if you already got an A, you'd be doing this for the simple personal rewards).
Sorry for the confusion in class...saved by the power outage. E-mail me right away if you still find bugs in this assignment.
-Prof. Dan Berkowitz