Data

Visualisation
Tutorial

By Andrew Fluck

with assistance from Jonathan Lewis

Activity
Data mining: British convict transport 1787 – 1867.

Adapted from work by Jonathan Lewis – with permission

You will use Tableau to explore the data set:
State Library of Queensland - British convict transportation registers
The data set contains primary source information from British registers, relating
to over 123,000 convicts transported to Australia (and Gibraltar, but you need
only focus on convicts transported to Australia) between 1787 - 1867.

Cleansed data file->

 Talking about data

Field

Record
Data Cleansing

Sometimes the dataset contains errors.

Then you need to clean it up before use.

E.g. delete the last 3 lines

Convert TEXT data to type ‘date’.
Extract ‘Term’ and ‘Convicted at’ from ‘Sentence’.
Your task is to discover new information and patterns
from the dataset and present it in your choice of
visualisations in Tableau. You must present one
visualisation worksheet for each of the following
descriptions (5 sheets in total). You must also produce
a word document that briefly summarises your
findings for each sheet:
1. Plot the number of convicts leaving for Australia
by year.
2. How did this compare with the number
of convicts arriving in New South Wales?
3. Identify any pattern/s connecting the year of departure, number of
convicts transported and the place of arrival. This visualisation must
divide the distinct groups. Van Diemen’s land, New South Wales, Western
Australia, and Moreton Bay.

Symbol maps

Treemap
4. The number of convicts that each
individual vessel transported to Australia
during the period between 1787 and 1867.
5. The vessel that carried the most
convicts, the years the vessel transported
them and the place of arrival in Australia.
Readings:

Riley & Hunt Chapter 2 (putting real-world data into a computer)