2018 Data Storytelling Studio @ MIT

The data say that most Hubway riders keep riding through adverse weather conditions like rain and heat. We want to tell this story because we want to celebrate Hubway riders’ resilience and illustrate how important biking and Hubway is to life in Boston.

Our data sources included all Hubway trips taken between 2015 and 2017 (excluding December 2016), and the weather (high temperature and precipitation events) for every day in that time period.  Our presentation starts with a hook: an appeal to Boston’s hometown pride through giving several examples of the city’s tough character and the map of Boston in the background. We then present a surprising fact that illustrates this – there are more Hubway trips taken on average when it’s over 90 degrees, and then compare this with behavior in other kinds of weather. Then, we look at a similar story through a different lens – average trip duration. Through these sections, we use easily recognizable icons to tie the graphs into the story – bike icons for the average number of trip pictographs, and stopwatches as pie charts to illustrate average trip duration. This fits into our framing of the fact that trip duration doesn’t change as a result of weather as “We don’t cut corners”. Using the Hubway color palette is also a visual language that our intended audience will associate with biking.

Furthermore, using the first-person plural and a casual tone in our narrative fosters the sense of community that we are trying to convey. Our final chart, which compares the viewer’s average ride duration in different weather with the average Hubway users, also encourages viewers to think of themselves as part of the Boston biking community and makes the data that we present more relatable by providing a personal point of comparison.

There are several stories that we considered but decided to leave out. For example, we looked at ridership of snowy days, which is lower than ridership on rainy or hot days but not all that different from the winter normal. However, we didn’t want to introduce another baseline of comparison which might make interpreting the charts and narrative more difficult. Telling the story of biking in the snow would be best suited for its own presentation. We also did not tell the story of gender in different weather. Similarly to age, the gender composition of riders did not change across different weather types, but we found this less surprising than the fact that the age distribution did not change. Finally, we also did an analysis of how origin and destination stations change in different weather but found (aside from those closed in winter) that they did not change all that much, which suggests riders are still going where they need to go. Ultimately, though, we decided that the duration piece told that story in a more comprehensible and relatable way.

The data says that some of the largest economies are far from meeting their Paris Agreement CO2 reduction targets.   We wanted to tell this story because the ability to credibly commit to sustainable practices will be essential to preventing catastrophic climate changes. Just as many individuals commit to lose weight but fail to follow through, many national regimes to reduce carbon emissions are off track. To make this issue more relatable to our audience, we have created a collection of health reports, resembling the report one would receive at a yearly checkup. This format naturally lends itself to sharing several indicator variables for healthy CO2 reduction along with a set of interventions that the patient (or nation) can take to alter the current trend.

Our group was drawn to study the CO2 data because of its relevance to the future of society. The World Bank’s statistics about CO2 emissions over time speak volumes about many aspects of life around of the world. However, often the scale of the numbers and units of measure are so large and the corresponding forecasts so technical, decision makers around the world struggle to internalize and act upon this information. We saw this as an exciting challenge for data visualization, so we have incorporated creative charts to display CO2 emissions trajectories overlaid with national commitments from the Paris Agreement. Our goal is for the viewer to find the information eye-catching and precise but also relatable.

At first, we were overwhelmed by the span of the data, both in terms of time and number of nations. We decided to reduced our scope to the countries producing a large share of global CO2 emissions. We used Tableau to sort and slice the data to find patterns over the past 10-15 years. With the coverage of the Paris Agreement controversy in the news, we were interested to explore how CO2 levels corresponded to promised reduction.

We found many data visualizations on CO2 emissions, but few were able to relate large numbers into a digestible form that had personal meaning. Many graphics used simple bar and line charts that failed to clearly express the story we were interested to find. We believe that the health report format is an appropriate way to organize statistics to tell a story about the credibility of Paris Agreement commitments to CO2 reduction. If we had more time, we would expand our analysis to more nations and segment CO2 by industry sector in each country in order to tell a more comprehensive story of the global CO2 reduction effort.

 

By Caroline Liu, Kunyi Li, Yihang Sui, and Arturo Chavez