The first chart is a histogram of the sum of the kinds of industry.It clearly illustrates that the clothing industry was very active in the City of Albany in 1850. In the second chart,a column graph, there is a definite conclusion-that men made up the majority of the workforce in most industries during this time, and were even the only gender present in certain places of work. The third chart, a pie graph, shows the counta of each of the industries, with Household work making up the largest percentage. In the last chart, a scatter plot, womens vs. mens wages is show.The conclusion made from this last graph is that men made significantly more than women even in many of the same jobs, along with the column chart illustrates the gender inequality of this period, most visibly in the scant earnings women made compared to men.
One aspect of working with this data is the gaps within some of the information. Of course with records that are sometimes illegible or have some kind of error, the data is not going to be completely indicative of the survey. That said, perhaps there was some data left out that could have made a more powerful statement. Of course the most glaring is the general lack of women workers in the data. There are some, but it is positively overwhelmed by the amount of male workers. I feel that if more information was gathered,than the data and the charts could have proven more enlightening to the story behind this industrial census. Also, at times, it seems like no real relationships could be seen from the data I was uncovering. It seemed that finding the median and sum was only contributing to finding numerical accounts of history, rather than personal and meaningful. The mathematical practice of plugging numbers into a formula was redundant at times. Only after generating the different kinds of charts did I truly see the fruits of my labor. By finding the median,counta,and sum, I was only adding to the narrative that the original information had began.
The pie chart and the histogram are easy to read because they are from the more complete data sets and they also include a lot less information than the other charts. The two others, the column and scatterplot are more complicated because they have to do with the strong inequalities between men and women in Albany’s 1850 workforce. The column in particular is completely jumbled and nearly impossible to read and decipher. The pie chart is meant to express the number of shops in each industry, while the histogram represents the number of workers in each industry. The column chart indicates the relationship between the number of men and women in each industry, while scatterplot shows the relationship between the wages of men and women in 1850. All in all, it can be said that business in Albany, with the data given, was a male-dominated world. I feel that with more exploration, perhaps a more complete story can be told. Perhaps more information could be found that gives women a more expanded role in commerce at this time.