Author: jmcconnell

Introduction

When messing around with the aesthetics of my individual project, I came across Tableau’s built in “treemaps” feature. I really liked the way treemap graphs looked, but I found that the beauty of the charts heavily outweighed the functionality (at least for my individual project). With too many data points, I was unsuccessful in finding a way to incorporate this type of graph in my final product. I even began wondering if there was much functionality behind treemaps whatsoever, or if they were a mere ploy of manipulating data visualizations with little truth to present attention grapping beauty.

My biased opinion of treemaps was put to the test when I stumbled across the following visualization while doing financial market research on http://finviz.com/map.ashx?t=sec&st=w52.

At first, I was very skeptical when exploring this data visualization, but after further review, finviz successful persuaded me in the actual benefits of treemaps by utilizing the categories below.

Visual Problem Solving

With the problem statement of: “Visualizing Financial Markets”, the author immediately gains attention from a very large audience. Market researchers, investors, businesses, and students can benefit from a successfully visualized financial market. To implement successful visual problem solving, a visualization need to include an objective dimension and a subjective dimension. This visualization successfully targets an audience with style (subjective) and utilizes truthful/persuasive data (objective).

Objective

To visualize the entire financial market, the author was faced with a very difficult task. He ultimately broke the market into categories- Technology, services, financials, etc. and further broke those categories into individual markets like: internet, software, hardware, etc. for technology. With this specified data, he could now make his “claim”, or in this case- his visualization produce truthful yet enlightening results.

Validation

Does the visualization contain a domain, data, and a task? The answer is yes. The author successfully integrates his financial data to his domain by creating business comparisons based on market KPI. The combination of his goal and his supporting data results in a convincing task that is actionable to the audience.

Aesthetics

            Finally, the most intriguing part of the visualization. The author boldly chose to implement treemaps, and could not have made a better choice. His task of visualizing financial markets is successful by his artistic way of comparing markets, industries, and businesses by their size. He allows users to see their KPI change over time, and delve into each market if desirable. Ultimately, he successfully developed a visualization that allows his audience to explore the product and come up with insightful results.

Introduction

Whether you are scrolling through social media, watching the news, or listening to politicians it is probable the topics of crime and violence will arise.  Because we are exposed to violence more often via news outlets, it is natural to assume crime is rising and America is becoming more dangerous. While we tirelessly watch another bullying video on Facebook, hear of the gang violence in our local cities, and listen to politician’s debate who is at fault, we do not see the raw data behind the arguments. What the media so often fails to report is the actual annual numbers and crime rates. I decided to do research on the real crime rate changes in America and the numbers were surprising.

I found the visualization below to be the most insightful and useful resource when reviewing crime in America over time.

Visualization

• The visualization uses FBI arrest database for crimes in 1975-2015 and allows users to interactively review crime rates and numbers over time.

Goal- Ultimately, this visualization aims to unbiasedly display the change in crime over time in major US Cities.

Audience- This particular article was posted during election time. The authors created this visualization in response to Donald Trump’s claims of American Crime being at an all-time high.

Claim- Despite popular belief, crime rates and numbers are widely decreasing. Though there are a few outliers, the general trends in the graphs are decreasing.

Rebuttal- The major opposing argument I can imagine would be the simultaneous change in populations. This virtualization attempts to limit these claims by allowing users to explore both raw numbers and change in rates per capita.

Pros

• Ease of Use: The virtualization allows users to explore a long list of cities, date ranges, crime types, and measurements in one concise graph.
• Thorough Definitions: The virtualization clearly states sources, data types, ranges, and its purpose.
• Simple: Though the virtualization is only a simple 2D, XY line graph, the contents are accessible to viewers and conclusions are easily made.
• Insightful: The virtualization presents the data in a strong manner, limiting opposing arguments.

Cons

• Axis: As the user adjusts the years, the y-axis does not change. When comparing recent years, it is very difficult for the user to see changes because the graph is zoomed-out too far.
• Crime Categories: Though it is useful to break up crimes by their types, it would be also useful to give overall violent crime numbers.

Conclusion

This article clearly defines the goal of displaying a downward trend in US crime. By keeping the audience and opposition in context, the visualization successfully presents data in a simple and interactive format that reinforces the goal and limits opposing arguments. The authors could go a step further and change a few cosmetics in the graph, but ultimately a compelling argument is represented.

 

http://www.informationisbeautifulawards.com/showcase/1543-crime-in-context

Immigration was perhaps the most complex, debated, and controversial topic of the 2016 United States Presidential Election. In fact, “over 60% of registered voters reported that immigration was an important factor on how they voted” (https://ballotpedia.org/2016_presidential_candidates_on_immigration). Donald Trump, in particular, used the topic as a center piece for his presidential campaign and took a drastic stand on the issue. Ultimately, Trump set forth on a plan to cut down the number of immigrants allowed into the US, particularly from Latin America, and aims to do so by building a wall across the southern border of the US.

In his arguments, Trump continuously stated he would fix the “lax regulations” currently implemented under the Obama administration, and reverse the “sky-rocketing” number of illegal immigrants coming to the US from Mexico. Trump based his viewpoint on popular belief and negative connotations rather than real data and scientific facts, as I will discuss below.

When researching immigration during the 2016 election, I came across a very interesting and useful article that essentially disproved Donald Trump’s arguments on immigration. The article includes two very powerful graphs which relay clear and concise conclusions on actual immigration numbers in the US.

Admittedly, at first glance this graph does highlight the spike in immigration numbers from Mexico to the US (although during the 90’s and not Obama’s administration). This graph is what most Americans saw during immigration debates and what Trump used in his arguments on how numbers are sky-rocketing.

One could simply argue Trump with only this graph, because it is clear that even though there was a jump in immigration, the numbers have already decreased over 3 –fold and continue to decline. However, a better opposition to Trump is the following graph that the article made which adjusts immigration rates by percentage of population rather than simply raw numbers.

The graph above gives viewers a more accurate impact of immigration numbers. By adjusting for population, the “sky-rocket” numbers are insignificant compared to other immigration waves we have had in the past. The number of immigrants today per population is only about .5%, which gives viewers a much different feel than raw numbers of 3,000,000. By showing both visualizations, the author has created a simple, yet conclusive analysis of the real immigration situation in the US. The wave already smoothed out by the year 2010, therefore proving drastic measures which Trump is proposing are completely unnecessary.

I chose this source for the Blog post because I found these graphs to be very successful in their presentation. It is amazing how simply changing the metric from sum to percentage the results can change so drastically. In addition, these graphs convey results that contradict the most powerful people in our country and half our population. It is so easy to fall prey to misconceptions of data when the topic is so controversial.

http://metrocosm.com/animated-immigration-map/

 

By: Jacob McConnell

In the local Santa Cruz newspapers, journalists express their joy as the winter storms slow and Spring season begins. After a multiyear- historic drought in the bay area, the winter of 2016-2017 brought massive amounts of much needed rain and within a few short months, officially put an end to the worst water shortage in state history. I, along with the rest of Santa Cruz county am grateful for the relieving effects of the successful winter. While I do not intend to undermine the severity of the drought, I have began noticing articles and statistics that seem skeptical in regards to the actual positive impact the rain has had on our community.

What caught my attention were a few graphs of the labor statistics of Santa Cruz County intended to highlight the increase in labor force at the end of the drought. Below is a snapshot of the Santa Cruz County Labor force depicted over the first two months of 2017.

At a quick glance, the graph displays a steep and steady increase in employment. The line actually increases 4-fold within the presented graph. However, simply looking at the numbers on the y-axis one can notice that the actual number of employees that joined the workforce was less than 1000. Out of the 131,250 workers, this increase is actually less than an 1% increase in employment. Admittedly however, if kept steady, this would result in an over 6% increase in employment for 2017, which would be very impressive.

After calculating this potential rise in numbers of the workforce, I too began believing the heavy rain quite possibly could be creating this increase in thousands of local jobs. The news mentions how our agriculture, flood and beach clean-ups, creek visits, landscaping, construction, and tourism were all benefiting from this winter. Though it is hard deny these claims, I noticed a trend in all the jobs being highlighted: they are all seasonal.

As a beach town centered around tourism and agriculture, some of Santa Cruz’s biggest producers of jobs are the beach boardwalk, the university, and the local farms. These organizations base large portions of their business on part-time and young workers. In order to analyze a trend in part-time seasonal work within Santa Cruz County, I pulled a graph of the 2016 labor force over the entire year.

By simply viewing this fully depicted graph, it can easily be concluded that there is a large spike in employment during the summer months. The start of 2016 is identical to 2017’s start shown in the original graph. It is hard to simply rule out the end of the drought as a job creator, but history shows it is more likely to be a seasonal trend in local employment rather than an actual positive impact the excessive rain had on the community.

Sources

https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet

http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/departments/water/drought/weekly-water-conditions

http://www.cityofsantacruz.com/departments/water/drought/2015-water-supply-outlook

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/article/NE/20170126/NEWS/170129769