Category: Minh Anh Nguyen

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