Project 2 A Vignette
2023-10-16
This project was really interesting, intimidating, and taught a lot. In this project I created accessed an API, made call functions for other users, and made a some exploratory data analysis. Data wise my most interesting finding was how many gaps the API returned in my queries. There was many “unknown”, “na”, or “0” that changed my view on data analysis. All these entries that had some cell of value, but would have to be torn out of the dataset because of their other null values. This finding made me question how skewed some data analysis can turn out if the data contains a lot of empty values. Maybe off of this finding alone I should have picked another database in order to return more usable data for each query. In my EDA I had questions about how much space men take up at the museum compared to women, which century is the most viewed, and which culture has the most viewed pieces. I was surprised that the 19th and 20th century are the most viewed by far. I would have thought that some earlier period pieces, like from the Roman Empire, would have swayed some major views to an earlier century. I was also intrigued that the Roman Empire did not show up with comparably high numbers when comparing different cultures and the total amount of online views they receive. Maybe this leads my most interesting finding to be one self reflection: I think about the Roman Empire too much!
I have had a lot of reflection over the course of this project. There were some highs and some lows too. Typically I can get lost in a flow of coding, but this time the flow turned out to be a negative as I dwelled longer on issues than I should have. My initial calls to an API led me down a rabbit hole trying to fix the syntax and after many frustrated attempts I would switch to a new API to try. With each new API or syntax attempt I realize the immense gap in my coding experience. For projects like these I need to reread instructions many times over for clarification. Each time that I went back to the directions I saw a new meaning in what they were asking for. This was probably my brain coming up with new meanings in order to attempt to understand the prompt. Each time I reread it, I felt the need to go and change what I already had. Not only did I spend a lot of time on little things, I also was not testing my code throughout. This lead to major issues as when I was entering my EDA phase I realized that nothing worked, and all my previous effort was inefficient. Next time, for a larger project like this, I should set an alarm to break up my work flow so I can bring a refreshed mind to the problem after a break, at the start of the project I would write out everything that the prompt is asking and create my shell ideas and then proceed, and lastly scrape out more time for coding.
Here are the links to my project:
https://github.com/jgally/project_vignette/blob/main/README.md https://github.com/jgally/project_vignette/blob/main/README.html