While on first glance the 1911 Charlotte, North Carolina, city directory is simply a listing of people and businesses, it contains many stories. I took a .csv file of the directory's 15,700 entries — which had been extracted from scanned images of the directory using OCR — to look for stories about places of worship in Charlotte. After cleaning up and transforming the data in OpenRefine, I used Tableau Public to visualize the data. This series of notebooks explains that process, presents my findings from the data, and suggest an avenue for further research and data analysis.
This exercise utlizes the following elements of computational thinking:
| Category | Element | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Data practices | Creating data | Generating data about religious denominations in OpenRefine |
| Data practices | Manipulating data | Sorting, filtering, and cleaning data in OpenRefine |
| Data practices | Analyzing data | Looking for patterns using Tableau |
| Data practices | Visualizing data | Creating charts and graphs in Tableau |
| Computational problem-solving practices | Computer programming | Using markdown language and code to build this Notebook |
| Computational problem-solving practices | Troubleshooting and debugging | Determing the right GREL expressions to use in OpenRefine |