News Vis Improv

[jhellier]

Grab a headline from today news with interesting data and create a vis for it. Using everything that D3 has to offer craft a visualization over the course of this session. This is an exercise of how fast you can create something compelling. One approach could be to have the group point out possible visualization targets with suggestions on what and how to visualize. A designated moderator would then organize these ideas for a designated ace D3 coder to implement. Hopefully by the end of the session you have something cool.

[enjalot]

+1 I'm a huge fan of trying to get people to rapidly create something, would love to participate too!

[jonathandinu]

+1 Can also use D3 deconstructor or Web Plot Digitizer to grab the data directly from an existing plot/visualization and reimagine it in a new and better way

[drifkin]

+1

[curran]

+1

One thing I heard Donald Trump say today is "Don't believe the unemployment rate statistics that say it's 5.1%, it's actually more like 25%".

Here's some interesting data I found that we could visualize:

• Overall US unemployment rate over time http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000
• 2014 unemployment rate by state http://www.bls.gov/web/laus/laumstrk.htm
• Unemployment rates by county http://www.bls.gov/lau/laucnty14.txt (imported to Google Docs and sorted)

[zanarmstrong]

@curran

Agree - super interesting questions around unemployment rate of time, and putting that in context over time and location!

Also - interesting questions about how the denominator (number of people who are employable) is changing as well as the numerator (number of people employed). And, how that relates to overall population. And, overall population by age & education level.

Similar questions for wage data, where the median wage is also affected by the labor force because you have to have a job to have a wage. For example, who does/doesn't have a job and what types of jobs people have. For example, layoffs among those working low wage jobs would raise the median wage.

In general, I think it's super interesting to dig into the "what does this metric really mean" question. And, does that metric changing actually imply what it seems to obviously imply?

For context, I did some research in the past that relates to this & data viz: http://research.google.com/pubs/pub42901.html

[curran]

Nice. I remember seeing you present that paper at InfoVis actually! Indeed, very interesting questions.

Another interesting topic might be the refugee/migrant crisis in Europe - this data set from The Migrant Files extremely rich and kept up-to-date: Events during which someone died trying to reach or stay in Europe. There are already a few visualizations of this as blocks that we could fork:

• http://bl.ocks.org/enjalot/7ea44d0bc364b6bddbd8
• http://bl.ocks.org/boeric/47aceae44bb5f8b63d7b
• http://bl.ocks.org/shobhitg/60eec0e1727c6c628728
• http://bl.ocks.org/curran/a479b91bba14d633487e

[zanarmstrong]

Wow - that's an amazing site... and dataset.

[curran]

It is! @enjalot also cleaned and posted starter blocks for these other data sets from The Migrant Files, I have no idea what they look like or what's really there inside them, these might also be cool to collectively visualize:

• The Migrant Files: Deportations
• The Migrant Files: Money

[epmoyer]

I connected two bl.ocks with scotch tape and got the Deportations data onto a map. Not my finest code, but it is my first geo visualization, which scored me another bingo square :)

http://bl.ocks.org/epmoyer/be227654fcf0025ea82e

[jhellier]

@zanarmstrong

Interesting stuff. Referring to the "Mix Effects and Simpsons" link, it is important that we try not to be too bias with our vis, unless of course we have an agenda. If we can present as much of the available data as possible in revealing ways, let the user make their own conclusions then we will be effective, honest and hopefully contribute to clarity.

[shobhitg]

+1 Love viz improvs. Its always very interesting to work on some data that is current in the news. There are bunch of topics like Terrorism, Migrant crisis, CA's drought, Democrat and Republican debates...