Category: 2b about partner orgs
Assignment 2B
This semester, I am interning at the Injury Prevention Center at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. The IPC is focused on educating and creating programs that will help reduce unintentional injury and violence among children, teenagers, and adults. Recently, injury prevention has gained attention within the field of public health due to the staggering amounts of injuries that happen each year. Many people believe that injuries are due to “accidents” or based on the individuals own fault, however there are many factors that can increase the risk for injury such as the environment. It is the IPC’s goal to raise awareness about injury prevention so that action can be taken to reduce these unnecessary injuries.
At the IPC, I will be helping the center by creating data visualizations based off of recent studies that have been completed. Although the research has been published, to the public’s view, the data that is presented is difficult to understand for many. Therefore, my job will be to translate the data sets that are given to me, analyze them and create visualizations that will be put up on the IPC’s website so that the public will be able to see and comprehend the work that the IPC has done. I will be working closely with Garry Lapidus, who is the director of the IPC, as well as other employees at this organization. I will also be interviewing patients, families, doctors, and other hospital personnel about injury and injury prevention that will also be put up on the website to give the data a story as well as visuals.
For the tools that I will need, it will be extremely important that I use different mapping tools, spreadsheets, as well as interactive charts and graphs that are user-friendly. Furthermore, HTML tools will be very helpful as well to put the visualization on the IPC’s website. So far I am in the preliminary stages of analysis and will hopefully be producing visualizations soon.
View Types of Schools in the Hartford Area in a full screen map
Partnership with The Connecticut Mirror
We (Minh and Minh Anh) are working together on the internship with The Connecticut Mirror, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news website. First launched in 2009, The Connecticut Mirror offers an invaluable and up-to-date resource of information on various topics, including politics, economics, education, environment and health care within Connecticut. The partner we are directly working with is Alvin Chang, who is the Data Editor/CAR Specialist of The Connecticut Mirror. A professional in the field of data visualization, Alvin holds a master’s degree from New York University in interactive art and has won multiple awards from the Society of News Design and the Online News Association for his work in storytelling through interactive data.
We are working with Alvin simultaneously on two different projects. The first is a dataset on consumer complaints on financial issues, in which we focus solely on the complaints in Connecticut. The other is a dataset on the number of lottery winners across different cities in Connecticut. In both of these projects, our goals are to analyze the data, examine and answer some questions raised from the data, and finally attempt to make our answers to those questions become accessible through the means of data visualization.
In regard to visualizing the data, it is definitely helpful for us to gain basic knowledge on making interactive maps, charts and graphs, as well as to learn how to effectively present ideas in a way that is both appealing and easy to understand. Some useful and user-friendly tools, such as Google Fusion Table and Google Spreadsheet, offer us a great start in achieving our goals. We are lucky to be able to work with a data visualizing professional, so our partner wants to encourage creativity to its full extent in all of our work, instead of just limiting it to what we know.
The following is a map of all consumer complaints on financial issues in Litchfield County, Connecticut:
View Consumer Complaints in Litchfield in a full screen map
Assignment 2b
For my Ed 399 Data Visualization Work, I will be teaming up with Professors Jack Dougherty, and Rachel Levanthal-Weiner. I will be working on numerous tasks with them, to help them with projects that they are either working on personally, or that will be presented in their curriculum.
These projects include charts that will be utilized in some of their educational studies classes, and a bike map that gives an in-depth view of cycling routes in the area of Hartford. Many of these assignments will require that I analyze data intelligently and insightfully. I will be looking at various spreadsheets, and will have to decipher what is meaningful and relevant, and what is not. Although I am pretty unfamiliar with both html code, and data visualization software, I find both to be very interesting. Most projects I will be working on will involve representing data in either graphs or maps. Below is a great example of how a map can be used to express data. Although it only shows various types of schools in the Hartford area in this instance, I look forward to creating more meaningful and in-depth maps in the future.
View Bad Map in a full screen map