Hey folks, I came across an interesting data set today, thanks to the New York Times. They provide an API that exposes a simple JSON file containing results from the 2020 United States Presidential Election. Data is broken down into a few useful chunks: news highlights, and state-by-state data, which is further broken down into county. You can see the per-county party bias, vote counts, absentee ballots, and much more.
I figured this data set would make an interesting foundation to build some data analysis content around. In my latest video, we take a look at how to retrieve and inspect this data, from complete scratch. No smoke and mirrors here!
After recording this video, I realized that I had forgotten to discuss the powerful Group-Object command, which provides summarized data on common fields. Despite my forgetfulness, this video does cover PowerShell commands including:
Sort-Object– sort a bunch of PowerShell objects, based on one or more properties, either ascending (default) or descendingFormat-Table– display PowerShell objects in a more readable tabular format, instead of list formatSelect-Object– a versatile command that allow you to select properties from objects, and limit the number of results
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