Z604/Z672 Comic Books and Their Readers

Digital and Empirical Methods for Studying Readership and Fandom
Spring 2024

12:40 - 15:15 Wednesday, Sycamore Hall (SY) 103

Instructor: Associate Professor John A. Walsh, jawalsh@indiana.edu.
Office Hours: Schedule at https://fantastical.app/jawalsh-r1Wz/office-hours.

Associate Instructor: Alex Wingate, alewinga@iu.edu
Office Hours: Thursdays, 1:30pm-2:45pm, and by appointment (click Zoom link in Alex’s profile)

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Excel lab

Instructions

You will use Excel to create 1 pivot table and 1 visualization based on data from the Cooper Comics Collection and then describe what the visualization tells us.

1. Download and explore the data
   • Download the data from the Cooper Comics Collection and take a minute to look through it in Excel. What would be an interesting question to answer with this data and how would you visualize it?
2. Select sheet and insert pivot table
   • Pick what sheet’s data you want to analyze. Select all the data for that sheet, and do Insert > Pivot Table.
3. Create your pivot table
   • Play with the fields in the pivot table settings to come up with a table of data that you want to visualize.
   • Copy and paste this table to the side to preserve it
4. Visualize your data
   • Using Insert > Charts, create an attractive and clear visualization from the data
   • Make sure to include proper titles and legends
5. Export your table and visualization
   • Copy and paste your table and the visualization into a Word document
6. Contextualize your visualization
   • In the Word document, below the table and the visualization write 2-4 sentences explaining what this visualization tell us.

     To turn in

     - A Word document containing the result of the pivot table, the visualization, and an explanation of the visualization
     - There are 5 possible bonus points if you turn in a second pivot table, visualization, and explanation (need all three components!).
     

Turn in to the Week 10 Lab assignment on Canvas, either as part of the same document or a different document from the visualizations you will generate in the Tableau lab.