For my data project I chose to work with a Titanic passenger data set, which had information about age, cabin class, gender, survival and other details. I wanted to explore the connection between gender and class as it related to the passenger survival rate.

Ultimately I ended up with a few mediocre graphs and a lot of hours spent trying to learn new tools.

I created the final graphs in an online interface called Quadrigram which has similar functionality to Excel’s graphing options. The Quadrigram interface is reminiscent of the Squarespace website building tools, and had a relatively easy learning curve. It allows you to publish your work on a website, for embedding or you can download the source code. While I didn’t need these functions, it would certainly be a good way to display charts on a project site. I also explored Excel’s chart functions but chose Quadrigram for the graphs to present. It took a little trail and error to figure out how to best format the data to achieve appropriate results, and all attempts at scatter plots were a profound disaster.

I downloaded Gephi which is an interactive visualization platform designed to illustrate connections. While it was interesting to explore it wasn’t the right fit for the questions I wanted to consider with this data set. Two programs which look promising, but that I was not able to explore yet are Analyse-it, which works with Excel to create data visualizations (only runs on PC) and Weave, though it does appear to have a steep learning curve.

For my presentation I’ll share the graphs and a quick overview of the Quadrigram interface.