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Book Bans in the U.S. during the 2021-2022 School Year

https://public.tableau.com/shared/62DZGJHCX?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

My current research question is looking at the overall story behind censorship of books in libraries and classrooms during the trend of political, religious, and parental organizations banning books in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. What are the top 10 books are being banned from July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022? Which authors were being banned against the most? Where did the most bans occur geographically across the U.S.?

Librarians, bibliophiles, and children of the future and present would benefit from an answer to this research topic because books open up new worlds for growing learners. Some children only have limited access to the books that are in their public libraries or classrooms, and the censorship of such books affects how they learn about certain topics, such as racism and sexual abuse. Additionally, people who are interested in reflecting how certain books changed their lives in any form may be able to relate to this. In my own childhood, books were one of the avenues that gave me perspective in viewing the world in a nuanced light. It’s a political subject of gray area: how do we determine when children should/can learn about these topics? 

I am using the dataset titled “Pen America’s Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022)”, which was procured through the “Data is Plural – Structured Archive” link found within Datasets webpage of the “Introduction to Data Visualization” Academic Commons website. Here is the dataset: PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022)  I downloaded the CSV file from the publicly shared Google Sheets document. It contains 3 sheets: Sorted by Author & Title, Sorted by State and District, and Methodology. The first sheet, “Sorted by Author & Title” is formatted with the following columns in consecutive (left to right) order: Author, Title, Type of Ban, Secondary Author, Illustrator(s), Translator(s), State, District, Date of Challenge/Removal, Origin of Challenge.

The Tableau story opens up with a personal reflection in order to hook the audience with some warm memories with books. 

I tried joining data on the names of the school districts from the Public School District File for 2021-2022 from The National Center for Education Statistics, as this dataset contained the latitude and longitude that would be necessary for mapping spatial data. However, only approximately 50 school bans showed up on the table, probably due to different school district names being used on each dataset. Another limitation was being unable to find a dataset with authors, their ethnicities, their gender, and their headshot images.More complex next steps would include cleaning the dataset, “Pen America’s Index of School Book Bans (July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2022)”. I would make sure that the school district names matched with those listed in the Public School District File for 2021-2022 from The National Center for Education Statistics. Additionally, I would look for a method to compile a dataset about the banned books, authors, and various metadata.

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