The Data visualisation me and my partner Marc chose was from a Washington Post on Natural disasters reported by Meko (2019).
Meko, T. (2019). Mapping America’s wicked weather and deadly disaster [Image]. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/mapping-disasters/?noredirect=on
Questions
1. What story does it tell?
This data from the washington post shows data visualisation using a heat map on America to depict the natural disasters that occurred during 2008 to 2018. So for the first one, it shows which part of america was the most affected from flooding, through the heat map this data conveys, the part which suffered the most is conveyed with different shades of blue. These data visualisations are very easy to understand. Like for the second one, it shows the tornadoes and hurricanes that passed through america, with the green representing tornadoes, while the orange representing the hurricanes.
2. How does it tell it?
As mentioned previously, this data uses heat maps to visualise their data.
3. Are you able to create multiple stories from it? If so what are they?
We noticed that the right side of America is more prone to natural disaster compared to the left side of america, so maybe, by creating a data vis it can highlight the top to lowest affected states.
4. What can you say about the visual design
The data vis is minimal in design as well as the colour of the map so the bright colours of the natural disasters can be highlighted for the viewers to focus on.
5. layout, colour, typography, visualisation style?
They both use the same map of the united states and visual style of having minimal design to their data vis and they show this through the use of a heatmap. The flood map uses different shades of blue to symbolise the water level in the areas shown. The hurricane/tornado map uses contrasting colours for the tornadoes(green) and hurricanes(orange) which also have different shades to them, to signify their wind speeds.
6. What improvements would you suggest?
An improvement I can see that could be to add are animation to the data to show the movement and directions of disasters as well as making the state lines and text more visible, as sometimes, the white text doesn’t contrast enough with the data, which makes it hard to read.
7. Where does the data came from, and comment on it’s source.
From the washington post and they got the data from:
- NOAA Storm prediction centre
- National hurricane centre
- Iowa national environmental mesonet archive
This source is reputable as they are government websites with specialists in this field of study
Reference
Meko, T. (2019, April 25). Mapping America’s wicked weather and deadly disaster. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/mapping-disasters/?noredirect=on
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