Interactive Exploration of the Employment Situation Report: From Fixed Tables to Dynamic Discovery

The monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Situation Report is widely anticipated by economists, journalists, and politicians as it is used to forecast the economic condition of the United States. The report has broad impact on public and corporate economic confidence; however, the online access to this data employs outdated techniques, using a PDF format containing solely text and fixed tabular information. Creating an interactive interface for dynamic discovery on the BLS website could elicit more dialogue between the public and government spheres, drawing more traffic to government websites and triggering greater civic engagement. Our work suggests that the implementation of interactive visual analysis techniques to enable dynamic discovery leads to rapid interpretation of data as well as provides the means to explore the data for further insights. This paper presents two inspirational prototypes: a dashboard of interactive visualizations and an interactive time series explorer, allowing for temporal and spatial analyses and enabling users to combine data sets to create their own customized visualization.