I created a bar chart race on Flourish. The below graphic shows the top 20 names of each year from 2001 to 2010 in New Zealand and how it changes from year to year. This graphic is particularly a good representation of this data because the majority of the popular names appear throughout the years at different rates. Thus, it shows the rise and fall of the popularity of names from 2001 to 2010 in a dynamic way. Since there are 20 bars shown, it offers the top 10 of each sex, allowing for each year and all the data for that year to be referenced. From the original style, I changed the bars to reflect the traditional baby colors of each sex, a light blue for males and a light pink for females. I also did not provide any pictures as it does not need them for clarity’s sake. I also changed the label in the data set from gender to sex as I feel like sex represents the data set more accurately than gender does. I also added a pause before it loops over again. This allows the reader or viewer to focus on reading the surrounding words as the graph becomes less distracting. As for what I did keep, I did keep the years and count in this graph as I think it provides an interesting statistic along with clarity of what year is being represented. The thing that I can imagine being improved is adding a title, but I don’t think it needs a title as it is being put in context by this blog post. As for the way it relates to digital humanities, this is the perfect example of a graph that needs technology to exist. There is not a possible way to represent the movement of popularity of names without some form of technology as it is not a static graph.
3 thoughts on “Reflective Blog Post #3 (Breanna Lefevers-Scott)”
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Your graph is amazing. I wish I knew how to place my graph into my blog post the way you do. The movement and visual aspects of your graph are extremely eye catching. The colors you used and the other choices you made were all expertly done. I agree that adding a title would improve it, but I still think it is very nice. I love your use of non static graphs.
Your graph is so cool. I think adding the pause before the loop was really smart, I wouldn’t have though to do that but I appreciate that you did because it gave me a second to reflect on what I just saw. You also bring up a good point. Graphs like these would not be possible without combining technology with the humanities and I think the digital humanities could do a lot with non-static data visualization to make things more interesting and show things static graphs couldn’t.
I love the graphics that you have incorporated in your blog post it shows the combination of data and technology perfectly as discussed in class and well as being informative without clutter.