Editing Community Data Science Course (Spring 2017) (section)

==== Paper and Code ====

Your final project should include detailed information on:

* The problem or area you have identified and enough background to understand the rest of your work and its importance or relevance.
* Your research question(s) and/or hypotheses.
* The methods, data, and approach that you used to collect the data plus information on why you think this was appropriate way to approach your question(s).
* The results and findings including numbers, tables, graphics, and figures.
* A discussion of limitations for your work and how you might improve them.

If you want inspiration for how people use data science to communicate this kinds of findings broadly and effectively, take a look at great sources of data journalism including [http://fivethirtyeight.com/ Five Thirty Eight] or [http://www.nytimes.com/upshot/ The Upshot at the New York Times]. Both of these publish a large amount of excellent examples of data analysis aimed at broader non-technical audiences like the ones you'll be communicating with and quite a bit of their work is actually done using Python and web APIs!  A simple Five Thirty Eight story will include a clear question, a brief overview of the data sources and method, a figure or two plus several paragraphs walking through the results, followed by a nice conclusion. I'm asking you to try to produce something roughly similar.

Keep in mind that most stories on Five Thirty Eight are under 1000 words and I'm giving up to 4,500 words to show me what you've learned. As a result, you should do ''more'' than FiveThirtyEight does in a single story. You can ask and answer more questions, you can provide more background, context, and justification, you can provide more details on your methods and data sources, you can show us more graphs, you can discuss the implications of your findings more. Use the space I've given you to show off what you've done and what you've learned!

Finally, you should also share with me the full Python source code you used to collect the data as well as the data set itself. Your code along will not form a large portion of your final grade. Rather, I will focus on the degree to which you have been successful at answering the ''substantive'' questions you have identified.

At least 25% of your grade for this project will be determined by the visualizations and tables in your report. Good visualizations should "stand alone" and motivate the core results in your paper all by themselves. A good question to keep in mind is "could I tell this story with the visualizations and a tweet?"