Survey of data visualization courses

categorical data
data cleaning
EDA
text data
This dataset is a survey of data visualization courses across universities and liberal arts colleges, containing information for each course that was found. This includes which departments teach data visualization courses, as well as the types of statistics and data science topics that are covered.
Authors

Ronald Yurko

Zach Branson

Monica Paz

Published

September 29, 2024

Data files
• data-viz-survey.csv
Data year

2024

Motivation

As statistics and data science educators, we are interested in how data visualization is currently taught across universities. To this end, we collected data on 154 highly ranked colleges and universities (based on U.S. News rankings), and determined which courses on data visualization, if any, were offered at each school. We recorded the name of each course, whether it was an undergraduate- and/or graduate-level course, the department(s) that offered it, and the topics and software taught based on its course description.

Data

Each row in the dataset represents a single university or liberal arts college that was included in the survey. There are university-level columns indicating the ranking (as of 2023), if the course catalog was accessible, and if any data visualization courses were detected. The remaining columns describe each data visualization course that was found for the university with the following information:

  • name of the course,
  • URL for course website,
  • level of the course (undergrad vs graduate),
  • the department(s) hosting the course,
  • list of topics covered in the course,
  • and any described software used in the course.

Data preview

data-viz-survey.csv

Variable descriptions

Variable Description
university Name of university or college
us_news_rank_23 US News ranking in 2023
course_catalog_accessible Boolean indicator denoting if we were able to access their online course catalog
did_it_include_any_class Boolean indicator denoting if we were able to find any data visualization class in the catalog
course_X_name Name of the X course (where X goes up to 15)
course_X_url URL for the X course if available
course_X_level Course level (undergrad, grad, or both) for the X course (note there is inconsistent labeling that requires cleaning)
course_X_dept Department name that hosts the X course
course_X_topic_list String of topics that were found in the course X syllabus (if available)
course_X_software String of software that were found in the course X syllabus (if)
type Type of college: liberal_arts or university

Questions

Data wrangling exercise: convert this wide university/college level dataset (i.e., each row is a single school with columns for every potential course) into a long course-level dataset (i.e., each row is a single course).

Additionally, here are some example questions to consider:

  • What type of departments teach data visualization courses?

  • Is there a relationship between the number of data visualization courses and the school’s ranking?

  • What words are commonly used in the name of data visualization courses? What words are rare? Do certain schools and/or departments tend to favor certain words in the course names?

References

Branson, Paz, and Yurko “The Landscape of College-level Data Visualization Courses, and the Benefits of Incorporating Statistical Thinking”. In preparation.