My experience with using Tableau online was an interesting one. At first, I had never used this type of application before, I did not know that I could turn numbers into visual bars and graphs. When I first started, I was wondering what type of information I could turn into a bar or graph and then I saw that we can explore the open datasets that were available online. I used the NYCOPENDATA website, and I started to search Community Gardens around my area. I was able to find a data set that included numerous amounts of identifying information. https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Environment/ARCHIVED-NYC-Greenthumb-Community-Gardens/ajxm-kzmj 

The data was in an excel format and identifying items like Borough in which the garden is located 

Community Board, Council District, Garden Name, Address and size of the garden in acres. It had about  

536 rows and 17 columns.  

When I started working on Tableau online, I was lost for some time trying to input this spreadsheet. After researching some YouTube videos, I was able to input this spreadsheet and able to create bar graph as below.  

This bar chart indicates how many community gardens there are in each borough. What I found amazing is that the application tool can seamlessly redistribute the data in different types of graphs, It can also create a mapping visualization if one was needed as well.  

As I was creating these different types of charts, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Drucker mentioned in her Article, Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display. In her article, she describes that “Data” is usually seen as a one-dimensional avenue with numbers and names. We often overlook the fact that these data sets have other hidden messages not displayed when simplified in a bar chart. For example, when I uploaded this data, I was thinking how many of these community gardens are famous, if any of these gardens have a wonderful history that can’t be explained in a bar chart. A thought that came to mind was, how many fruits and vegetables were stolen today and was that recorded?  

Overall, my experience was fun and the digital humanist in me greatly sprouted ideas all over.