This is the latest entry in NPP’s weekly Data Wednesday series, a getting-started guide to NPP’s Federal Priorities Database. All previous posts are archived here.
When looking at data, you may hear or read the phrase normalization. Simply put, normalization is transforming a set of data so that they may be compared in a meaningful way. Still sounds geeky? Although you may not realize it, you use normalized data all the time.
A common example is unemployment numbers. Knowing the total number of unemployed people in an area is interesting, but it isn’t enough information to compare ...