Tasks
- Reflect on the lecture and reference material provided to identify a scientific, cultural or environmental story, that matters to you. Outline the research and initial visual development on your research journal.
- Develop and design a piece of information graphics that successfully communicates a scientific, cultural or environmental story.
Reflect on the lecture and reference material provided to identify a scientific, cultural or environmental story, that matters to you. Outline the research and initial visual development on your research journal.
Nothing immediately came to mind for what matters to me that might have some interesting data on it. I thought about basing it around Walthamstow and went onto the Waltham Forest website, but nothing caught my eye. Well, I did find out my bin collection days are changing from Wednesday to Thursday in a couple of weeks, but nothing specific for this course.
1
This morning I was reading an article on Refinery29 about the rise of pronatalism and how the current Hungarian government are promoting birthrates among its citizens to buoy up its population rather than accept immigrants. The initiatives to increase nursery places and subsidies for single mothers at first seem progressive, however coupled with the restricted access to abortion and the government’s prejudice against immigration, the policies take a sinister turn. By coincidence, I heard that in 1960s Hungary (it was a storyline in Call the Midwife), it was much easier to obtain an abortion under socialist rule. The changes to women’s rights struck me at the same time and I wondered how to convey this information plotted against other rights and women’s rights around the world, or against standards of life at that time in Hungary.
2
Don’t Lose Your Way is a campaign for people to discover and submit lost rights of way before the right to add paths to a definitive map in 2026. So far, paths have been found based on historical knowledge, and my idea would be to plot these paths on a map with information about why they were lost and how they were refound.
3
I work in publishing, and it is has a stereotype of employing white middle-class women with double-barrelled surnames living and working in London. This is very, very accurate. Many initiatives have been set up to diversify the workforce and the books they publish so that the workplace, books published and their authors more accurately reflect modern UK society. The Publishers’ Association has conducted surveys for three years to ascertain the depth of lack of diversity and how, or if, the industry is changing. The data is presented in a report that uses bar charts and pie charts – but could it be differently and more engagingly? Using this data, I would create a piece of data information to visualise the diversity in publishing compared to the general population.
4
Following the publishing theme, I have access to lots of data on publishing. With the recession and various economic uncertainties, it has been said that publishers are less willing to take chances on unknown authors and more likely to offer contracts to small number of authors whom they feel will definitely have strong sales. Is this true? What has been the effect on sales?
Inspiration
http://www.peacewall-archive.net/maps
Develop and design a piece of information graphics that successfully communicates a scientific, cultural or environmental story.
It took me some time to come up with what I wanted to represent this week. My interests are wide and varied, but not things that I thought I could represent visually. My friend and I were talking about how we hate how crowded the tubes would be after half term (typical London chat) and I thought that I could use this as visualisation.
This is a London Tube map, to start:
There are eleven lines that carry over five million people a day to their destinations, whether for work, leisure or education. But how does this change across the lines and throughout the day?
To get the data, I searched through what Freedom of Information requests had already been made, and found this dataset. Requested in 2019, it is a record of the passengers on each line every fifteen minutes from line open to line close.
It doesn’t make much sense like this!
Data integrity
It would have been nice to have 2019 data or data from multiple years, and for this project, I would put in multiple FOI requests to obtain this information.
The information has been sourced directly from Transport for London, and as the stations have barriers at entry and exit, so numbers can be electronically tracked. I feel we can assume a fair degree of accuracy!
Using the data
The lines are different lengths from the shortest at 1.4 miles to the longest over 100 miles. Here’s a quick infographic to show this:
Nice, but does it really show any surprising information? Not really. By combining the data with the table, I can advance it like this to show passengers through line.
I’d like to turn it into an animation running through time on the London underground map with the lines increasing as passenger numbers increase.
Collaborate through group discussions on the Ideas Wall.
Anna Robinette 