About

1.) Sources

Our main data source was the 2020 World Happiness Report, which heavily incorporates/relies on several annual data sets from the Gallup World Poll.

In answering our humanistic research questions and analyzing our data sets, we refer to an array of knowledge and perspectives found in various books, scholarly articles, and websites. From these sources, we adopted different economic, psychological, and social perspectives on the differences between happiness and wellbeing.

As we adopted this spectrum of perspectives, we added multiple secondary data sources to provide more insight and evidence for our arguments. These datasets came from a variety of sources, such as the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and other years of the World Happiness Report.

2.) Processing

Our primary data set was provided by the instructor as a csv file and was imported into Google Sheets for easy collaboration. All secondary data sets were found online as .xls or .csv files except for the Gallup World Poll Country Data, which was found as a PDF and had to be coded into the primary data set by hand (and triple checked for accuracy).

All variables sourced from secondary data sets were cleaned, color coded and appended to the primary dataset for ease of use using a combination of OpenRefine (an open-source data cleaning and augmenting software), Excel, and Google Sheets.

All data visualizations on this site are made and shared through Tableau, a powerful (and beginner-friendly!) software that we were lucky enough to have access to.
Early visualizations crucial to our understanding of the datasets were made using RAWGraphs and Palladio as well.

3.) Presentation

We first hosted our website through Github, a free, web-based hosting service, which allowed our Web Designers and Editor to collaborate under a repository named, worldhappiness. After getting the website hosted, we used the Mobirise desktop app to build the website. Mobirise is a web design application that streamlines designing a website into an aesthetically pleasing, and user friendly, interface -- all without us having to code.

That being said, the code editor Sublime Text was occasionally used in order to apply aspects of our website that Mobirise could not do, such as embed our Tableau visualizations. Additionally, to ensure usability, accessibility, and readability, the site and features of its design were run through a few tests, such as the Toptal color blind filter, the WebAIM contrast checker, and various WCAG guideline checklists. Finally, after getting our website designed, we used the Github desktop app to easily publish all its iterations and final product of our website.

Ronke Akoh

Project Manager

Ronke is a fourth year Music Industry & Media Navigation major with a minor in Italian, who is most happy when she’s creating music. As the project manager, she oversaw the overall execution of the digital project, keeping track of the team’s scheduling, arrangement, and achievements of milestones. Ronke guided the team’s communication and checked in with subject-matter experts.

Emily Chee

Web Designer

Emily is a third year Cognitive Science major. She was responsible for hosting the website through Github and overseeing the creation of its content. Additionally, she tied together connections from the annotated bibliography to complete the narrative of socio-cultural effects in happiness evaluations.

Elena Leon Guerrero

Web Designer/Editor

Elena is a fourth year Psychology major with a minor in Digital Humanities. She was responsible for creating the overall design and layout of the website, implementing the project’s copy and visualizations, and publishing the website. Through her role as editor, she also worked to ensure consistent design, readability, and accessibility throughout the project.

Andrew Thompson

Data Specialist

Andrew is studying information studies. He oversaw the sourcing, cleaning, refining, and augmenting of the group’s dataset. He standardized and formatted data and contributed data visualizations and helped conceptualize and write the copy for the project.

Himani Yalamaddi

Data Vizualization Specialist

Himani is a third-year Cognitive Science major. She was responsible for creating the data visualizations seen throughout the site and helped clean and code new variables into the primary dataset.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our wonderful TA Nina Bjekovic for all her guidance during the creation of this project. For answering all of our questions in record time, the encouraging notes for every step of the project, and always being present, mindful, and willing to help us in any way she could -- thank you.

About the Process

This page gives an overview of the steps we took in composing this humanities project with descriptions of our sources, data processing, and presentation. You can read about our team and acknowledgements here as well.

The Three Levels of a DH Project