Final Project Topic Ideas
When is the next rocket launch?
Rocket launch data is available in a number of different databases, but it is difficult to search for and filter through. However, it’s important to know what is launching when and where to schedule other flights. Help create a visual explainer that displays useful information about current and past rocket launches (i.e. trajectory, launch time, weather, etc.) It may be helpful to use techniques from the class (filtering, brushing & linking, etc.). Here is the NASA challenge you could also enter with this project.
Explore the Stanford Daily archives
The Stanford Daily Archives contains 18,931 issues comprising 143,685 pages and over a million articles. The archives document campus life and history are documented in these archives from 1892 to 2014, but it’s difficult to find trends or insights with the current system. Create an analysis tool for the Stanford Daily Archives. This could include allowing viewers to find trending words, topics, movements in the archives, or possibly campus views on different political movements or actions.
Newspaper Navigator
The Newspaper Navigator is a Library of Congress dataset that extracts the visual content of historic newspaper pages. They apply crowdsourcing and machine learning techniques to identify photographs, illustrations, maps, comics, cartoons, headlines and advertisements. Design an interactive explainer to let people explore different aspects of this data set.
Data source: https://news-navigator.labs.loc.gov/
Why is my flight delayed? Investigating Flight Delays & Cancellations
Flight delays are estimated to have cost air travelers billions of dollars. FAA/Nextor estimated the annual costs of delays (direct cost to airlines and passengers, lost demand, and indirect costs) in 2017 to be $26.6 billion. With external dataset, you can try to uncover the correlation between flight delays and factors like weather. Using the geological information, you can also identify and visualize the geological pattern of the flight delays. Investigate the common causes or potential pattern of the delays and present the insights you find with visualization.
Data source: https://www.kaggle.com/usdot/flight-delays#flights.csv
Other data sources
As noted in Assignment 2, there are a variety of data sources available online. Here are some possible sources to consider for a data analysis/explainer project.
- Data is Plural - Variety of datasets and sources covering many topics.
- Stanford Institutional Research & Decision Support - Stanford institutional data (e.g. enrollment, admissions, diversity, etc.).
- Stanford Open Data Portal - Stanford Daily’s open data sets.
- Big Local News Data Archive - Stanford Journalism’s Big Local News Project data sets.
- data.gov - U.S. Government open datasets.
- U.S. Census Bureau - Census data.
- Federal Elections Commission - Campaign finance and expenditures.
- Federal Aviation Administration - FAA data.
- Awesome Public Datasets - Variety of public datasets.
- Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer - We have recently released a tool that can be used to analyze who and what appears in the last decade of Cable TV News (i.e. CNN, Fox News, MSNBC). The site lets you download data as well which you could use to conduct further analysis.