For our lab this week we were tasked with creating a data visualization of the top ten data baby names in New Zealand from 2001 to 2010. The visualization gave me some issues. I knew I’d wanted to show the change in popularity over time for each name and so I did some exploratory graphs, none of which turned out to be particurally useful. Then as I went to go for a good old fashioned line graph I noticed in Flourish the “line chart race”, which is just an animation of a standard line chart.
The chart opens up in the “all” view, but the information is more clear split up into girls and boys. You can click on individual names to see their paths. I changed the line type to curves and corrected the y-axis to fit the data, as the default made everything squish together in the middle. I also changed the color scheme to have enough colors for each name, though due to the sheer amount of names there are some that are very similar. I tried to follow the design principles we were taught, but I couldn’t quite fix some of the settings (particurally of the names) to get it looking cleaner. I had to reformat the data to get this to work. It now looks something like this:
Gender Name 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 F Emma 303 310 379 352 315 286 280 253 235 228 F Sophie 285 308 307 299 254 295 351 356 386 377
One thing that I’m worried about is that I corrupted the data in some way by reformatting it, made a typo or copying mistake or something. I believe that my visualization is appropriate to show what I wanted, that is the change in popularity of each name that appeared in the top ten over the 2001-2010 period. The lines show the change for each name over the period, although I might’ve done better taking out some of the lesser used names, as when they skip a year it becomes a bit disorientated.
Reflecting on the readings, I noticed that the history of data visualization even with the “counterhistory” article is quite Western European focussed. There are of course earlier examples of data visualizations than the Renaisance. There’s an Ancient Egyptian map from the New Kingdom (c. 1150 BCE) that is topographical and geologic, called the Turin Papyrus Map. There’s also Babylonian astronomical tablets that depicts astronomical data. that It’s something that stood out to me, that even in the “counterhistory” article it was still dominated by the accounts of Europe.
I think that my visualization relates to DH as a way to animate and visualize change over time, something that a lot of humanities fields deal with. I could theoretically visualize the changes in types of pottery style with the animation and isolate to whatever style is of interest at the moment. The interactive element allows each line to become more visible when clicked on.
