Data Visualization Lab & Exploration

I chose to use a linear dendrogram style graph (hierarchically structured data with a tree structure) to visualize the top 10 baby names in New Zealand from 2001-2005. I was interested in the relationship between the names and rankings (ordered) overtime and found the hierarchical structure to best represent the data in a visually clear way.

I tried my best to integrate the CAPS concept for visual presentation in Lin’s lecture:

Contrast Alignment Proximity Simplicity

Contrast

The default graph had 3 names colored the same shade of grey and other names similar color shades that were hard to differentiate. I assigned colors to the names alphabetically with Red going to Charlotte and magenta going to Sophie. This way, it was cool to see if there were any patterns in terms of first letter and popularity, although I did not notice any outstanding ones.

I also made a minor adjustment of changing the name labels from bold to normal text emphasis. Because there are so many of them, bolding the text made the graph visually overwhelming and having cleaner lines ameliorated that.

Alignment

Because the RAWGraphs site I used presented the data for me, the dendrogram was already aligned more precisely than I, a human, could achieve manually.

Proximity

I changed the height to make more space between the hierarchies and decreased the margin size to consolidate information.

Simplicity

My first observation was that having data of top 10 names from 10 years was visually overwhelming. To make the visualization simpler and easier to digest, I limited the data to 5 years (2001-2005).
In keeping things simple, I chose not to include the name counts because they did not significantly vary from the years 2001-2005 (min 180, max 337) and the relationship between sample size and popularity did not interest me as much as that of the name and popularity over time.

Connection to DH

Digital humanities involves the advancement of humanistic inquiry enhanced by computational technologies. Using RAWGraphs to visualize the relationship between baby name popularity over time in a way that our human brains could not deduce by looking at the raw data falls within the realm of Digital Humanities because this practice allows us to find more information about bigger humanistic, cultural questions that we would not be able to do without computers.