Data
We cleaned the CLAP data from scanned and OCR’d PDFS, plus some original PowerPoints from the CLAP staff, by uploading our corpus to Voyant and excluding prevalent non-content words (e.g. “gmail.com,” “like,” etc.).
Tool
We exported the Voyant data, slightly reformatted it, and uploaded it to Flourish to create cleaner, more interactive graphs.
What is the data viz doing?
This data visualization is exploratory. We created it to look into how different drug- and substance-related terms showed up over time in the CLAP, perhaps giving us a little look into the lives and interests of past Carls. It could potentially be useful in order to destigmatize substance use on campus, and perhaps give students the confidence to seek help or start conversations about their and their friends’ substance use. We think the CLAP is a good place to look for this information because it is unfiltered by nature and accepts a wider range of student submission, unlike peer publications like the Carletonian.
Changes for clarity
By default, Flourish’s Y axis does not have enough decimal places to accurately show the values of our data, so we made sure to change that. We also reformatted the dates on the X axis so they could be comprehensible. We also added a chart and an axis title.
