The topic this week was data, which is an all-encompassing term used for many applications. While looking at the background reading, I noticed that my eyes were drawn to certain types of visualizations. One example is the Flow Map, which I have seen more recently with the spread of COVID-19. This type of visualization stuck out to me because I see graphs like it on the news and online. It grabs your attention and shows the data through movement geographically.

Looking at the Team Member Card Picker visualization, I did not love the setup of the data. I found it to be too busy for my liking. Though my opinion is negative on this visualization, I do see the positives by structing your employee data in this way. It allows the reader to quickly understand the structure of the team without too much information. The type of data needed to create this was basic data from the employees on the team. The disadvantage of this type of visualization is the inability to compare employees simultaneously. The reader is only able to see one team member at a time, which limits the amount of information that one is able to take in during a short amount of time. I think the idea of this type of visualization can be changed to display the data more efficiently. I would have created circles instead of rectangular blocks to soften the look of the webpage. I would also have created a feature to browse the data for each team member without having to click on each person, but still allowing the reader the option to view each team member alone by clicking on their image. This would create a more efficient website and display the data in a more professional, efficient way.

In the second visualization link, The Demographics of Others, I was fan of the way the data was shown. The data from this website from the 2016 American Community Survey, which the author states at the bottom of the webpage. The data is shown to show the differences in the United States which can be filtered by age groups, race, and gender. The advantages of this type of visualization is the real time change in data when changing filters in the demographics. Another positive of this type of visualization is the ease of comparison between not only different demographics, but their percentage breakdowns in each category. A disadvantage would be that the number of persons for each square is unknown, so the data could be skewed. I think adding a key to this data chart would make the data more efficent and effective.

In the last visualization link, “Based on a True Story”, the data is shown in a crowded, consended graph. The data shown portrays which parts of each movie is true and rates the truth in each scene. The advantage to this display of data is that the reader can easily determine the percentage of truth to each movie. Additionally, the reader can choose to have more details in specific scenes for the movie. A disadvantage of this kind of visualization is that there are areas in each graph that are not easily accessable. This can make the data more difficult to read or gain more information from.

On the internet data is an important tool that is used to display information, whether it is scientific like the demographics example or more light-hearted like the movie link. These three examples have shown that there are different visualization tools to display data, which is important to consider when creating an online structure for your data.