What types of visualizations were you able to generate in Excel using PivotChart? How could those visualizations shape or impact your understanding of the data? Did you generate any visualizations that were confusing or misleading? Alternatively, did you generate any visualizations that were unexpected or illuminating?

Through Excel, I could generate a variety of charts–pie, column, line, bar, scatter, etc. charts. There were some combinations of variables that disallowed the ability to turn that data into a particular chart. For example, static data probably wouldn’t be reasonable to use for a line chart.

For the data I used, I think that having ~160 data points led to drastic differences between some categories, like households with at least one family member that was born in another country (Sweden, Germany, Hungary, etc.) categories. Not paying attention to the total number of immigrants from those particular countries and making those comparisons, which would be a difference of maybe 1 versus 5 households, may look more drastic than the reality is. Because the sample size was considerable but not large, I did find that the results are predictable more or less. I would imagine a larger sample size would produce results that feel like misleading data visualization-wise.

Seeing data simplified also gets me to analyze my gut thoughts and reactions. I learned from the Grinnell Walking Tour that Grinnell was made to be a place people would go to retire. That’s why it surprised me to see a very low number of individuals above the age of 65. I thought that maybe it didn’t become a hotspot for retirement until after 1870? Then, I thought that it might be more reasonable to lean towards the idea that the average life span of an individual in the United States in 1870 was not near 65 and that the broad range of 18-64 compared to 65+ may not be helpful in this regard.