Monday, January 28, 2013

Playing with Google live forms and beer

I've been taking a course called "Diving Into Data," taught by Lisa Williams, through the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas. Of course, I've been diving into data for some time now, but class has been fun and I've gotten to play with some fun tools that I haven't had time to experiment on my own, like Processing.

For this week's homework, we're building live forms using Google Drive and creating charts that automatically update based on the responses. I'm pretty predictable, so I made a short survey about craft beer. Click here if you want to take it.

Here are some charts based on the responses I've been getting so far. If everything works (fingers crossed!), these charts should update whenever someone new fills out the survey. This is a good test to see whether Google tools work well together, since Blogger is owned by Google.

I'll be playing with this more (prettifying the charts, adding information like the total number of survey respondents, etc.), but I wanted to get this up there so I can start getting feedback on it. The more interesting data (in my opinion) will be the quantitative data (how much do you spend per week on beer? what do you think is a reasonable price to pay for a beer?). I've set up a spreadsheet that tracks, in real time, the mean, range, and standard deviation of those responses, but haven't yet figured out the best way to display it.

You can see the raw data from the survey here.

And here's the compiled data. Let me know what you think...