Introduction
To showcase the top 10 most popular baby names from 2001 to 2010, I chose to portray this dataset with a bar chart race from Flourish. This is because, as the years went by, the names changed places. So, doing a race to showcase the top names for each year and choosing a bar chart became appropriate because a person could visually see how big the name was during that year. From this, the bar chart race portrays the dataset in an engaging and informative manner. Here’s the link!
Changes to improve clarity
To further improve the clarity of the visualization, I had to make modifications to the dataset in order for Flourish to create the bar chart race. I did this because I wanted to make the bar chart clear to a person who didn’t know what the dataset talked about. The first modification was to have each name occupy a single row and have the years occupy each column, along with the counts for the respective name. Secondly, I created another column classifying the gender of each name and color-coded the bar chart with this information. I also gave a descriptive title and changed the sizing of the legend so it will grab a person’s attention. From these changes, I was able to make the dataset easy for a person to understand the top 10 names for each year from 2001-2010.
Reflection
As I reflect on Lin’s slides with my visualization, I took some information about creating visual differences with color when I chose blue and pink to portray each gender. Alongside this, I played with proximity and made the legend larger and the title larger to grab a person’s attention. I also took notice of how I wanted to portray quantitative information, so I made sure that the bar chart included the year and the corresponding counts, with the names associated with the year. My visualization relates to Digital Humanities because Digital Humanities puts an emphasis on creating and visualizing a dataset in a thoughtful and inclusive manner for everyone to participate in, rather than just seeing numbers. Due to this, Digital Humanities can utilize quantitative data to examine trends and create a narrative. So, my visualization creates a story about popular names from 2001 to 2010.
2 thoughts on “Lab Assignment 3: Visualizing Popular Baby Names”
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I liked your graph for a few reasons- the bar chart race format makes it easy to visualize and compare all the popular names together, and because you’ve highlighted the last (smallest) bar to draw attention to the fact that it’s the only girls name, and showing its relative lack of popularity. I think it’s really interesting that there are much higher numbers for the boys’ names than there are for the girls’ names.
Your data visualization is really great – I found it to be very digestable and easy to understand, down to your choices in colors. Your choice to narrow it down to the top 10 names each year highlighted the differences and similarities between boys’ and girls’ baby names. I, like Kate, found it very interesting that the boys names seem to be more popular, while the trends are less dramatic for the girls.