2018 Data Storytelling Studio @ MIT

The scenario of violence in Brazil is alarming. In 2016, 61,600 people died victims of homicide in Brazil. This number is comparable in magnitude to the victims of an atomic bomb. Inside a scenario of high violence, it’s necessary to understand how the different types of violence occur. Between 2009 and 2016, almost 22 thousand people died in Brazil due to police action—more than 4,200 only in 2016. The victims were 99% man, 81,8% of them between 12 and 29 years old, and 76,2% of them black. In a report, published in 2015, Amnesty International affirmed that the Brazilian rates of police-led killings are the highest in the world.

The data presented is about police killings and police killed in Brazil in a simplified way to make presentations for different audiences that are not specialists in the theme and also to publicize on the internet and draw attention to the theme in social networks. To publicize on the Internet and draw attention to the issue in social networks. The source of the data in the compilation made by the Brazilian Forum for Public Safety based on the official criminal reports.

With this presentation, the authors intend to show the magnitude of the problem to a more prominent audience on the social media. This discussion usually is made using charts and different statistics and become too complicated for a big part of the population. It’s urgent in Brazil that the people understand that the police is violent and discuss the idea that violent must to be tackle with violence.

This infographic is much better than the uses that other forms of publicizing the data, but still confusing. It would be interesting to use different pallets of colors and other visual effects to show the statistics to become even more effective.

 

Sofia Reinach

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/01/us/elections/nine-percent-of-america-selected-trump-and-clinton.html

This short story from the New York Times is one of my absolute favorites, the data are simple: it’s just US population data, and voter turnout.

The goal here is simple: give an understanding of who votes in primaries in the US electoral system. Narrowly, the audience are readers of the New York Times, but the more implicit target is really those interested in the then-ongoing primaries.

I think the simplicity of the setup makes this incredibly effective: it builds a complex picture of the American electorate in 6 simple steps. By building it layer by layer, it breaks down a complex topic into very simple terms.

https://i.reddituploads.com/10f961abe2744c90844287efdd75ba47?fit=max&h=1536&w=1536&s=f019986ae2343e243ed97811b9f500fe

caption: My daughters sleeping patterns for the first 4 months of her life. One continuous spiral starting on the inside when she was born, each revolution representing a single day. Midnight at the top (24 hour clock). [OC]

 

This data shows whether the author’s daughter was awake or asleep each day for the first four months since she was born. Perhaps the most interesting fact of this graph is that there is no legend – no description of what blue and tan represent.  When I first looked at this graphic, I immediately assigned blue to be sleeping time, and tan to be waking time.  It wasn’t until writing this blog post did I realize that nothing explicitly told me this.  The audience, broadly, is reddit users who subscribe to r/DataIsBeautiful.  The point of this subreddit is to post and share effective and aesthetic visualizations of data; thus, the purpose of posting was less about the sleeping data directly, and more about the unique presentation.  The author wanted their visualization to convey, approximately, how their daughter’s sleeping patterns changed over the course of four months.  In particular, how their daughter initially slept all day and woke at night, but after some time converged to the standard sleeping schedule.  I say ‘approximately’ because we are only given two quantifiable markers: the top of each wind represents 12:00 midnight, and the outermost wind represents 4 months.  These could have been augmented with 24 (or even just 12) hour-marks around graphic in a circle, and with circles denoting the 1 month, 2 month, and 3 months marks.  I thought the data was quite effective – with barely any information about what the data was of, I was immediately able to see how their daughter adjusted their sleep schedule.  Zooming in, I can count rings to see that the switch happened quite abruptly at around 4 weeks.

Link: https://media.wired.com/photos/5932cb5052d99d6b984e07c0/master/pass/infographic_of_infographics.png

Screenshot: 

What Data is Being Shown: This graphical presentation contains a large amount of information regarding the characteristics of infographics. The data set is a randomly selected collection of 49 infographics. The graphical presentation contains key information specific to this data set such as: chart styles in the infographics, fonts, colors, and theme.

Who I Think the Audience Is: The audience is people who are interested in and analyze a lot of infographics. Graphical designers and companies that produce infographics professionally are likely very interested in this sort of information.

The Goals of the Presentation: The goal of this presentation is to educate the reader/viewer on the common characteristics or themes in the infographic realm. I believe that another goal associated with this presentation is to help graphical designers understand how to design unique and differentiated infographics relative to industry norms and standards. This presentation also helps the reader/viewer to understand which countries, regions, and professions utilize infographics as a communication tool.

Whether It is Effective or Not and Why: I believe that this is a somewhat effective infographic because it is largely just presenting information, which it successfully does. However, there is not much of a “story” to this infographic or the establishment of a “problem”. This can easily result in a disinterested reader/viewer. Beyond this, since there is no established “problem”, there is not really a “solution” presented in the data presentation. Therefore, the reader/viewer is left wondering: “what is the point of this” at times.

Mitchel Myers

One data presentation I saw recently is one project by the Senseable City Lab at DUSP regarding the home countries of international students at MIT. The like is http://senseable.mit.edu/mit-world

The data connects each international student’s home country with MIT. The map draws an arch between MIT and one country’s centroid. For example, if a student is from Canada, an arc is drawn between Canada’s center and MIT. The arc is colored blue for undergraduate students and red for graduate students. A thicker arc from a country indicates more students are from that country. The data is also stratified by year; so a line chart below the world map shows the change in number of students across years.

I think the audience groups may be: 1. the administrative staff at MIT, because they should care about the school’s basic statistics and trend; 2. the prospective students and families, because they care about school’s diversity; 3. the current international students enrolled, because they may be curious about where they situate. The goal is to present numbers in a vivid way and to highlight countries that are outstanding.

I think visualizing data on the world map is appealing because it is straightforward to target the outstanding counties that deliver a large number of students. However, I think the centroid presentation is a little misleading because not necessarily the counties’ population concentrates at the center. But I acknowledge it is still effective to present the data this way. Also, I don’t understand the color of some countries; for example, China and Canada are colored red–maybe that means these countries have a large volume of students. Adding a legend may be helpful.