visuelledata/hk-gender

Visualization and analysis of the gender gap in Hong Kong

[Mini-Project] Hong Kong's Population Gap

Goals

• Establishing a proper workflow that would be useful in an analytics or reporting environment.
• Study various ways to visualize data with a minor focus on document design.
• Improve my ability to communicate insights about data.

The process

I started out by looking for datasets on Hong Kong's open data portfolio. Once I found an appropriate dataset, I began to make some basic plots to learn more about the data. I became somewhat distracted at this point in the process and spent some time figuring out how to make multicolor annotations and multicolor titles. You can see the functions I made in the functions folder of this repository. This required somewhat more difficult programming than I've done recently, so I had to review some programming concepts and I spent some time improving my programming skills.

When I started to focus on this project again, I began by writing out my markdown document and then seeing how I wanted to use the plots to convey the information that I wanted. Once I had an idea of what I was going to do, I started formatting the plots to make them more easily readable and to help communicate my ideas. At the end of the project, I began to work on all of the documentation and making this repository more orderly.

What I learned

If I were to do this project again, I would start it in a notebook rather than a script. This would make the project easier to come back to if I took a break from it. I would extend the data exploration phase, and then start writing a report to get a better idea of what I wanted to communicate. I would leave anything that's non-essential to the project until the end and try to implement it once I have my project nearly complete. Finally, I would've done everything possible to be more organized throughout this process.

Endnotes

If you want to see my code, then you should look at the markdown file for the final version. The code.R file isn't up to date and I'm only keeping it as a personal reference.

Finally, you can view the final version of this project on my portfolio site.

All of the data used in my calculations and graphs is from Hong Kong’s 2016 Population Census.

The data is from tables A117a, A117b, and A114 and is distributed by the Census and Statistics Department.

They are available for download on Hong Kong’s open data portal.