Exploring Socio-Economic Trends in England and Wales: A Visual
Analytics Approach
Spring 2025
1. Overview
This coursework aims to give you experience of the whole lifecycle of carrying out a full
visual analytics project. By completing this coursework, you will develop skills in exploratory
data analysis, visual storytelling, and critical evaluation of data visualisations.
Your goals are:
• To follow a sound visual analytics process
• To develop a visualisation that displays important features of a dataset
• To write a clear report on your findings.
The outputs from this work should be
1. A Tableau dashboard and associate worksheets (as a packaged workbook: see
[Link]
us/save_savework_packagedworkbooks.htm ) - The dashboard should provide an
interactive analysis of the selected data, highlighting key findings and allowing users to
explore the dataset/findings. If the dashboard is not submitted as a packaged
workbook, the marker can’t open it, and this will receive a zero mark!
2. A written report with sections as defined below. The report should explain the
background of the selected socio-economic issue, describe the data analysis process,
and justify the chosen visualisation methods.
3. Python script
The submission deadline is 13:00 on Thursday 8th May through Blackboard: create a single
zip file containing all the files in your submission. This coursework is worth 80% of the marks
for the unit.
2. Task Details
The task you are asked to carry out for the coursework is to design, construct, and evaluate
an exploratory analysis of a complex dataset using both information visualisation and data
projection. This dataset should be based on census data for England and Wales. You should
design the visualisation to address some socio-economic issues that is important to you.
You must submit at least two data projections using different algorithms, implemented
in Python using the methods covered in the labs. Each projection should result in a matrix
representing the transformed data. Save these matrices in a file, such as CSV format, so
they can be easily imported into Tableau for visualisation. Ensure that all files and scripts
used in your work are saved and included in your submission. We also need to review the
Python code used to generate the projections, so please provide it along with your data. The
purpose of data projection is to reveal the data structure, including clusters, outliers, and
relationships between different labels.
You will be using data from the last two censuses in England and Wales – 2011 and 2021.
The first set of data is taken from the 2011 census in England and Wales which is indexed
by the Excel file 2011CensusIndexofTablesandTopics_v11_4_2.xlsx. The tab labelled ‘All
Tables’ provides a list of tables and links to the underlying data. You may find Tableau’s
Data Interpreter useful, and you may also need to edit some files to create usable datasets.
There are more than 1600 tables in total: clearly, this is far too many to create an interesting
report. You should focus on a limited number of tables (probably around three or four) that
allow you to explore a particular aspect of socio-economic life in England and Wales: for
example, health and links to nationality or occupation.
A new census was carried out in 2021 (during the pandemic). Some of the results have been
released by the Office for National Statistics, but so far these have only been in certain
topics. A link to the topics that have been released can be found here
[Link] You should find that
you can click through on a topic to a map display [Link] and
from here select a topic such as ‘Housing’. Selecting a variable changes the map and also
provides a link to download the data for that variable. Perhaps simpler is to visit the bulk
downloads page [Link]
You need to use both data, the 2011 data and the 2021 data for at least one of your
visualisations. Select 3-4 tables from the 2011 census and at least one dataset from
the 2021 census for comparison. Use at least two different dimensionality reduction
techniques (e.g., PCA, t-SNE) to visualise patterns or clusters in the data.
Something to note: Some geographic definitions don’t necessarily match between the two
census dates. This site will help you manage this
[Link]
You are expected to use Bayesian methods in any of the following ways:
- Census data often has missing values. Instead of using simple mean/mode
imputation, students should apply Bayesian methods (e.g., Bayesian Linear
Regression) to estimate missing values probabilistically.
- Use Bayesian models to infer missing socio-economic attributes (e.g., income levels
in regions with sparse data).
- Apply Bayesian methods to predict trends in census data (e.g., housing affordability
in 2030, employment trends).
- Use Bayesian posterior distributions to estimate credible intervals.
- Or any other way as long as you can justify Bayesian modelling choices.
Your report should contain the following sections:
• Abstract. A brief description of the key points in the report.
• Introduction. The background of the problem.
• Data Preparation and Abstraction. Describe the data manipulation necessary to create
a dataset for analysis and the principal data types and semantics that you have
analysed.
• Task Definition. A description of the tasks using Munzner’s task taxonomy for which you
have created the visualisations.
• Visualisation Justification. Define the visualisation techniques you use and justify your
choices. You should refer to the principles of info vis, relevant aspects of human
perception and cognition, and the scientific literature where appropriate. You should also
explain why you have chosen the data projection methods that you have used. This
justification and explanation are a very important assessment criterion, so do not skip on
this and make sure that it is grounded in the theoretical concepts we have covered
during the course.
• Evaluation. Using appropriate levels and types of validation (as in Chapter 4 of
Munzner), assess the quality of your visualisation by making appropriate measurements
and observations of the other students in your discussion group in an analytic task using
your visualisation. (The list of discussion groups will be available on Blackboard).
• Conclusion. It is expected you will address two aspects.
• What you have learned about the socio-economic problem that was the basis of the
visualisation.
• What you have learned about information visualisation from doing the coursework.
We are expecting the report to be about six to ten pages in length. This is an expectation,
not a strict limit, so there will be no penalty for exceeding it. But if you find yourself writing
much more than this, you are almost certainly providing too much detail. In particular, note
tha we will see the visualisation you generate, so there should be less or no need for
screenshots.
We use the term 'dashboard' in the Tableau sense of a set of visualisations on a single
screen. It is permissible to submit more than one Tableau dashboard or workbook if that
supports the task better. Do not feel you have to squeeze everything onto a single
dashboard.
Geocoding issues
It can be hard to plot the census data in Tableau because it does not contain outcode
information. This blog contains some geocoding packages and a video on how to use them
that support geographic information at many different levels of granularity. It should be
helpful for you.
You may have some problems with using geocoding packages, in which case this link to
Tableau help should be useful.
[Link]
creating-map
We have also provided a short guidance note on the Blackboard site, under assessment
information.
3. Assessment
The assessment criteria are:
• Problem understanding: How well you have explained the goals of the tasks,
considering end-user requirements. Clearly define the socio-economic issue and its
importance, identifying target users and their needs. (10 marks)
• Data preparation and task analysis: How carefully you have extracted and
manipulated the data, including insights gained through task analysis. (15 marks)
• Data visualisation: How appropriate the visualisation and modelling approaches are,
including systematic use of statistical and visualisation methods, with justification for the
chosen approach. (50 marks) – 32 marks will be awarded for the visualisation, 10 marks
for dimensionality reduction and 8 marks for justification.
• Conclusions: How effectively you communicate what the user should learn from your
analysis and what you have learned about large-scale data visualisation. (15 marks)
• Presentation: How fluently and coherently the written text is structured, including the
quality of images and graphics used. Writing should be clear, concise, and logically
organised, with appropriate literature references. (10 marks)
Below are some general points that will help you when working on this coursework:
• Ensure that questions you set out to ask are answered by the visualisation and in the
report.
• Having the option of switching between absolute values and proportions is often a useful
feature. This is particularly helpful when comparing areas with different populations.
• When using dimensionality reduction, it is important to communicate to the user which
variables were used in the original data space as otherwise, it is hard to interpret the
plots.
• Tooltips should identify the corresponding point (e.g. a location), particularly for projected
data.
• The introduction should contain some discussion of the type of user the visualisation is
intended for.
• The report should note data anomalies (e.g. missing values) in the report, in particular,
quantifying the number of missing values, etc.
• The abstract should describe the main findings of the work.
• Data cleaning matters.
• The use of section and page numbers helps the reader to navigate the report.
• References to secondary literature in your report’s lit. review are valuable tools to
provide context.