Heres what you missed last week:

"After conducting my lit review and supplementary data analysis, I am beginning to think I’ll need to refine my corpus. I have generated a list of questions about the legislative side of this story that the data do not tell.

Specifically, after looking at the minimum wages of Texas over time in comparison, I wonder what defines the lag where the state minimum wage falls below the federal minimum wage. Are there rules defining when legislation can be updated? What obligation do the states have to update their minimum wage laws? Is this obligation defined by relative dates (relative to federal policy) or concrete dates (i.e. 5 years after federal updates, states must update). It also made me wonder how it is that Texas spent so long paying it’s workers less than the federal minimum wage. Why is Texas’ minimum wages so much lower than Massachusetts, and especially federal minimum wages? What is the process for creating and updating minimum wage legislation?

  • Check out my work for data-driven storytelling, where I explore my secondary dataset with Ian Dinnie here

  • For a reminder of my overall objectives with this project, visit this page here

This Week’s Goal: Get acclimated with Minimum Wage legislation

The goal of this phase is to get to know the body of legislation that defines my institution in question: minimum wage. To understand the implications of the actual text in the corpus, I will investigate the structure, purpose, hierarchy, relationships and other aspects of the web of legislature that informs the institution I am analyzing.

  • Check out the DOR site
    • They have compiled a guide to nagivate the web of legislation surrounding minimum wage, start here
  • Narrow down where to find documents that will redefine your corpus
    • What documents specifically define federal minimum wages? And the states?
    • Who creates them?
    • Who are they written for? Who abides by them? Are those groups different?
  • Narrow down ways to redefine your geographic areas of comparison
    • Federal vs State
    • Federal vs a Region of States individually vs the Region as a whole
    • Red vs Blue States
    • Look for any other natural breaks in the structure/hierarchy that offer a categorical boundary for comparison

Reference Guide: Minimum Wage Legislation

After digging around the site for a while, I am feeling really excited about the level of explaination offered to navigate legislation. I decided that some of the information was important enough to copy down to form my won reference sheet while working. The link below will take you to an outline of the notes I collected from the DOR website on minimum wage legislation. Specifically, it details the basics of what laws exist, who they apply to, and when they apply.

  • Click here to check that out.

Corpus and Other Documents

Also embedded in the reference guide is a link of “pinned references”, as I call them. In this Google drive folder, you will find various files that offer other explanations of the legislative.

Embedded within the folder are three possible corpus documents as well.

  • Click here to check out those documents.