(My project also has issues viewing in a browser due to loading textfiles. Here’s my project.)

My project looked at visualizing people’s happiness, as it relates to their occupation and their salary. I used two different sources of data: University of Chicago’s General Social Survey, a large, comprehensive opinion survey conducted pretty regularly since 1972, and the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’s Occupational Employment and Wage data. Among routine questions including occupation, age, gender, etc., the GSS has a question about how happy people are in their life. Cross referencing this with the salary statistics from BLS, I hoped to gain insight into whether people were really happier if they earned more money.

I think I underestimated the complexity of the data and the interface necessary to effectively explore it, so I didn’t manage to fully implement some features I had intended. Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the outcome as far as representing my idea, given the time, even though it is incomplete and there are some technical and design issues.

My greatest trouble with this project was working with the data. The GSS and BLS data had to be comparable across occupations and span many years (I originally planned 1972-2008) however BLS only provides 1998-2008 and GSS simultaneously provides data only every other year starting in the 90’s. The main issue by far was the occupational codes. Standards changed every few years and I had to write 7 different parsers in Processing to convert the data to something usable, and even then I found that there was errors in the data translation (you may notice that postmasters earn an unusual amount of money in my viz).

Some features that I plan to implement are sorting the data, scraping BLS.gov for occupational descriptions to give a little insight into each job, and a more organic softbody interaction with the bubbles. I had originally placed a lot of emphasis on getting the softbody interaction to really capitalize on the buoyancy as happiness idea, as well as have the various occupations/industries pushing past each other.