TitleTo be determined.

MotivationIn the areas of sociology and political science, among others, it is not only useful but imperative to understand the social stratification of a demographic data set. Social stratification is the heieracrical arrangement of social classes. This arrangement can be based on many characteristics, such as race, income level, or profession. The study of social stratification can lend insight into trends resulting from the class hierarchies. For example, in an overly simplified example, one can compare the annual income of black families to that of white families and draw conclusions from it. Therefore a robust tool for observing social stratification is needed to be able to accurately compare these data and draw correct conclusions.

Previous WorkIn a seminar class I took in 2007, my adviser and I, along with several other students, undertook the task of improving a previously existing social stratification visualization tool, as well as designing and implementing our own. These tools can be found at http://cs.wheatoncollege.edu/mgousie/research.html under "Visualization of Social Stratification".

GoalsMy goal is to implement a more streamlined, easy-to-use, robust, and comprehensive tool to visualize this data. This tool will combine all of the strengths and hopefully weed out all of the weaknesses of the preexisting programs. The data will be taken from the Current Population Survey (CPS) of the U.S. Census Bureau, and it will be updatable and complete. The visualization tool itself will be written in Ruby, while the data will be stored in an SQL database. Ruby On Rails will be used to interface with the database.