Team Chart Soup: Dylan Laufenberg
CS 510 - Analytics in Data Science
Portland State University
Winter 2020
Team Chart Soup: Soup Kitchen Dashboard
I will develop a set of roughly 3-5 data visualizations over the Bounty data set using Highcharts.
Two terms ago, I worked with Terry Tower to explore the Sharing God’s Bounty soup kitchen’s website database. I presented our work to Bounty’s Fearless Leader, and we developed a list of visualizations that he would like to see added to the website’s administrative dashboard. With this project, I aim to develop prototypes of these data visualizations using technologies that will integrate well into the website’s existing codebase and are free for non-profit use. These visualizations, once integrated into the website, will serve two purposes. First, they will allow leaders to visualize and analyze our meal service over time, e.g. to predict how many guests we might see any given week or to analyze trends over time. Second, these visualizations will allow leaders to assess their readiness for the annual Christmas event in terms of volunteer and donation needs vs. sign-ups. These visualizations represent Bounty’s first ever analysis of historical data, since the website’s database is Bounty’s first and only source of historical data.
I will develop the visualizations primarily using Highcharts, supplementing with D3 or plain HTML if needed or appropriate. I will either adapt the existing SQLite3 database to this use case (e.g. by adding metadata about Christmas event dates each year) or use the CouchDB database from my term project last term, which can already answer the questions I will pose of the data. I will most likely run queries through Sinatra, but if time permits, I might develop a Ruby on Rails prototype, since the website uses Rails. The final deliverable will not be a fully formed administrative dashboard but will instead be a set of (hopefully interactive) visualizations ready to be integrated into a future dashboard.
As I am working solo, I will perform all work for this project.
For those with permission (e.g. Kristin and Hisham), the prescribed task list is available here.
Kristin Tufte has full permission to use all materials associated with this project, including but not limited to future classes, and may share these materials and grant these same permissions to others.
Please note that the data set is not included in this repository and will not be shared.