This repo contains materials relating to the project for IASSIST 2023, which focused on interactive visualisations for 2021 UK sexual orientation and gender identity data. For more information, please see the abstract below.
The 2021 UK census introduced questions on sexual orientation and gender identity, which were presented in various orders and with slightly different wording in different countries. These new and potentially sensitive questions were clearly marked as voluntary but voluntary responses can sometimes lead to results not being reported in as fine detail as mandatory questions. This complicates the analysis and means discussion on places with the highest proportion of non-straight people, trans people or other novel group identifications may not be especially useful for comparison. Thus, these questions represent a novel but complicated way to understand the UK population. At the same time, interactive visualisations are increasingly popular way to illustrate data in ways that are engaging and potentially very illuminating. Dynamic or interactive data representations do not use a few static images to illustrate complex conclusions, but instead allow audiences to test intuitions, double check understanding, and focus on comparisons in otherwise impossible ways. For example, an interactive map created in R means that users can quickly move from between aggregates values at different levels of detail, can track changes over time, or both at once. Advancements in geospatial analysis have proven effective for the safeguarding of novel groups, so interactive spatial visualisations of sexual orientation and gender identity can support policy development. Combining this novel census data with sex, religion, religious diversity, spatial location, and rural/urban classifications allows for a better understanding how sexual orientation and gender are represented across the UK.
You can see that we have two subfolders 'Python' and 'R', with the former including code for the interactive scatterplots and the latter focusing on interactive spatial visualisations.
Interested in citing our research in one of your papers? Just want to snoop around and have a look at our metadata etc etc? Please find our Zenodo DOI below.
