I finally tried Tableau for the first time yesterday and I’m keen to make the most of it. So far I’ve just been playing and figuring out the interface through trial and error. I wanted to get some basic graphs looking at income over time done for the UWA – Cuts Hurt campaign, so that was my starting point.

The data:

Data sources for these two graphs were very reliable and easy to access. I needed to know how much the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) had been worth over time and the value of the UWA Safety Net Top-Up from 2009 to 2016. From there I could calculate annual and weekly income easily. One of my colleagues saw the first bar graph and suggested overlaying the poverty line for each year, which introduced a third data set.

The APA rate per year

This data set is available from 1959-2016 on the website of the Department for Education and Training. I limited the range to 2001 fairly arbitrarily, partially because there was a mid-year indexation in 2000 which would have looked messy. I manually entered the range into a Excel to get started. UWA Safety Net Top-Up Scholarship

UWA News provided the 2009 starting point for the scheme and the value. Having started my postgraduate candidature in 2011, I knew the rate had gone down to $3,500 per annum by then, but finding out the rate for 2010 took a little digging. I had no luck finding a cached version of UWA’s scholarship information page through the Wayback Machine so went digging past Page One of the Google results. Blog posts from 2010 (eg: 1,2) showed the value was $3,500 in 2010 – less reliable than a UWA-based source, but good enough. Finally the 2015 and 2016 rates were calculated manually by subtracting the APA rate from $29,000 as per UWA’s new policy which is clearly stated on the scholarship page. Australian Poverty Line

This one required a bit more work and a few assumptions. The data source is good, all the numbers are calculated from Poverty Lines: Australia, a quarterly publication from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at The University of Melbourne. I used the June Quarter 2015 Report, published 26th October 2015 which was the most recent information available.

The major assumption I made was to use the poverty line for a single person with no dependents. This is not representative of every postgraduate student at UWA, but is a fair comparison point for the value of the APA, which is supposed to be used for the “general living costs” of the awardee.(APA FAQ 4) The poverty line for a single person including housing costs in June 2015 was $517.55 per week, the weekly income in 2015 for a postgraduate at UWA with a scholarship and top up was $557.69.

From there, I calculated the historical poverty line each year from 2001 onwards, always using the June figure for the sake of consistency. I used the numbers and formula provided by the Poverty Lines: Australia report. To calculate the historical poverty line for a single person, “multiply the current value of its poverty line by the ratio of per capita household disposable income in the June quarter… to that in the current quarter”(Poverty Lines, 26/10/15, p.3)

That is: $517.55 x (per capita household disposable income in the June quarter for given year / $822.84)

The raw numbers for per capital disposable income were entered into Excel and then a formula used to calculate the poverty line for each year.

If anyone can see an error in the data, I would appreciate any feedback!

The fun part:

I started with the total living allowance UWA postgraduates receive. I wanted to find a way to visualise that while the total amount new research students are receiving may stay the same, UWA is investing less in research students’ basic living income.

Years APA Rate UWA Top up Total living allowance 2001 17267 0 17267 2002 17609 0 17609 2003 18009 0 18009 2004 18484 0 18484 2005 18872 0 18872 2006 19231 0 19231 2007 19616 0 19616 2008 20007 0 20007 2009 20427 5000 25427 2010 22500 3500 26000 2011 22860 3500 26360 2012 23728 3500 27228 2013 24653 3500 28153 2014 25392 3500 28892 2015 25849 3151 29000 2016 26288 2712 29000

Excel generated a nice enough bar graph, but I wanted to show UWA’s contribution more clearly.

Here I turned to Tableau. I imported the Excel spreadsheet easily enough, but then spent 30 minutes trying to work out the language and logic of the program. After an impatient glance through some online help, I managed to get the below graph.

Not a bad start, but not quite visually clear enough. I had a play with the colour assignments and with the display size in story mode and eventually settled on the below.

The flatter, longer version looks less dramatic but is easier to create an easy to follow narrative. Each colour makes it clear where there has been a change in UWA’s approach and there is a clear reflection of the reduction in funding since 2009.

To be honest, I don’t know how I finally managed to get this to display – there was a lot of clicking, dragging, undoing etc in the program. But the results were good enough for me to persist.

Next challenge was to track the weekly income of UWA postgraduates (assuming an APA/UPA and Top Up) against the poverty line from 2001 to 2015. The first attempt in Excel was not lovely and also I programmed the graph poorly and the graph is adding the two data sets to create the red line.

This time frustrated with Excel, I went back to Tableau.

I love this graph, because I think it makes how hard it is to live on the research student income really obvious at a glance. The sharp jump up in 2009 is testament to the great decision UWA made and the slight kink down in 2014 is testament to the fears of the UWA – Cuts Hurt campaign.

It was a fun first foray into the tools Tableau can offer, but I feel like I haven’t even scraped the surface of what the program can do in terms of analytics. I’m looking forward to playing with some other data sets and getting a bit more creative.

Feedback is always welcome if you have any thoughts on improvements, as are suggestions for other projects or data to play with and create some cool visualisations.