three levels of our digital humanities project
SOurces
Our project examines federal education funding in the United States over multiple decades, analyzing how shifts in funding categories reflect political priorities rather than purely educational needs. To build a strong foundation for this research, we drew on a wide array of primary datasets on federal K-12 education funding, as well as secondary sources exploring policy history, fiscal allocations, accountability systems, and structural inequalities. Utilizing keywords such as “education budgeting,” and “federal funding,” and “categorical aid,” we were able to access a diverse range of scholarly articles, reports, and policy analyses that helped contextualize the quantitative data we analyzed.
These sources provided insight into how federal funding has been structured and implemented. For example, a source highlights that federal categorical aid often reflects political bargaining and ideological conflicts over state versus federal control, rather than coherent educational priorities (Timar 1994). Similarly, Jennings (2018) traces the evolution of federal involvement from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) to No Child Left Behind (NCLB), noting the shift from equity-focused policies toward accountability-driven funding tied to standardized testing. (Heise 92017) further explores the tension between federal and state authority under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), revealing how funding categories and accountability mechanisms remain shaped heavily by the political side rather than classroom realities. Other sources have also examined the practical enforcement and effects of funding policies. Analysis has shown that post-pandemic emergency relief funding in California showed that large sums intended to address “learning loss” were allocated according to pre-existing policies such as Title I and the Local Control Funding Formula, instead of actual student needs (Barton et al. 2023). Investigations have also explored whether additional resources provided to low-performing schools through the Accountability Theory of Action improve student outcomes, displaying a variety of spending patterns across the states that indicates the influence of political priorities on funding allocation (Blair et al. 2024)
Altogether, these works allowed our team to interpret the relevant datasets as not just records of expenditures, but evidence that underline the political choices that shape such educational priorities that exist in modern day. They provided historical and political, and even practical perspectives on how funding categories evolve, how federal and state authority interacts, and how structural disparities remain even without federal presence. By combining these quantitative measures with the annotated secondary sources, we were able to identify patterns and correlations that show which aspects of education are favored and overlooked. Our visualizations have been extracting data that was pulled from scholarly and credible sources in order to demonstrate tangible evidence and display to strengthen our argument. Similarly, our timeline also makes several references to both primary and secondary sources to clearly show when key acts were passed and movements or happenings that are connected to their aftermath.
Our combination of both primary datasets and secondary research sources have allowed us to construct a narrative that captures the idea that federal education funding within broader political, historical, and socioeconomic contexts. This holistic approach allows us to critically assess not only how funds currently and have been distributed across the nation, but also what these patterns reveal about the values of the government in ruling their people’s education. These quantitative measures are displayed and analyzed to further bolster the argument that bias exists within these allocation patterns, even though they may seem neutral just at first glance.
Process
Our analysis draws from longitudinal federal education funding data organized by programmatic categories including, Title I, accountability-related funding, and emergency relief funds. These datasets were primarily extracted from online research and were verified to be credible sources with their sites ending with .gov or .edu. The datasets were a little overwhelming to read in general at first; however, with further understanding of every part of the data present, we were able to clean and structure the data in a manner so that it was easier for us to identify patterns in how funding priorities have shifted across different policy phases.
To further structure our analysis of these numbers, we organized the dataset to build a timeline that shows light to major legislative actions and funding charges, especially during the 2009 American Recovery Act and the COVID-19 relief period. Rather than focusing only on the size of funding increases or noticeable spikes, we examined more closely on the direction to which the trends are going, shifts in funding categories, and moments where the structure of federal expenditures have changed. This allowed us to study how funding priorities evolve over time and how certain programs have become more emphasized than others during different political moments.
To visualize these patterns, we downloaded the relevant datasets and utilized the software Tableau in order to create our data visualizations. Tableau has allowed us to identify long-term trends and notice patterns in funding distribution. Some funding categories also appeared more ambiguous, such as “Other,” which made it harder to determine exactly how funds were distributed. Identifying these gaps helped us think critically about transparency within federal education budgeting.
Once the visualizations were finalized, we embedded them directly into our website so viewers could interact with the data while reading our analysis. The page content was then added and formatted into the site to connect the visualizations with the narrative sections of the project. Some areas of the site were highlighted during development to indicate sections that were still being finalized as we continued refining our analysis and layout.
presentation
To build our final presentation, we utilized a Humspace domain provided to us by UCLA and the website making platform WordPress. We focused our website design on the theme of education and school, tying the term “blackboard” into our logo, domain name, and home page, as a creative spin on the popular characteristic of American schools. To further demonstrate the significance of our argument, we included images and visual depictions of children in educational settings–an acknowledgement that funding allocation inevitably impacts future generations as education is a fundamental building block of life. We also included a dedicated data critique page to analyze the datasets we extracted from other sources.
We wanted to display the information in a cohesive narrative, so we structured our narrative in a logical storyline rather than an influx of information. Therefore, we decided to organize our website in such a way that readers could navigate the website as if they were reading a story– introducing initial context through research questions, introductory text, and a timeline, then diving more deeply into topics like funding trends, crisis moments, geographic disparities, and broader conclusions. The homepage introduces the project’s main research questions and overall goals, while later sections connect the narrative directly to data visualizations that answer our research questions.
Our visualizations, which are all made with Tableau, are directly embedded into the website as interactive elements, offering readers an opportunity to explore the data on their own. Each data visualization is connected to a supplementary text analysis of our interpretations of the patterns depicted in the data, allowing us to connect these trends to our narrative and answer our research questions. By combining interactive data visualizations with narrative explanations, we guide the audience through history, patterns in funding, and the broader implications of federal education funding decisions. This structure allows audiences to explore the data themselves while also following the larger story behind how funding priorities shape the realities of education.
Overall, our team maintained a timely schedule of meeting internal deadlines throughout the quarter. We distributed weekly tasks amongst ourselves and stayed organized through a cohesive document, and discussed and ideated the structure and narrative together as a group in the weekly discussion section. Upon learning new topics relevant to our project, we added them to the list of references and explained our reasons and setbacks for using them as well in our data critique page.