Category: DataViz Team 2014

Partnership with The Connecticut Mirror

Posted on Author Minh Anh Nguyen and Minh 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

Assignment 2b

Posted on Author Ben Peterson

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

Update for community partners

Posted on Author Jack Dougherty

Dear community partners,

Thank you for hosting a Trinity intern from our Data Visualization seminar this semester. My students are just beginning to learn how to design and create interactive charts and maps that fit your organization’s needs, and I’m delighted that you’re participating in this learning experience.

At the link below, you can read more about our seminar and the other community partners. Guests are welcome to sit-in on any of our Monday 12-1pm sessions (I bring a light lunch meal to share), or to follow our work online at: http://commons.trincoll.edu/dataviz/

Currently, Trinity interns are prioritizing their partner’s data visualization needs and sources, and writing up a public post about the early stages of their projects. Also, I’ve instructed our interns to discuss our public-private policy with you. We design our work for the open web, but we also understand cases where individual-level data must be confidential or works-in-progress must be hidden from public view until approved by the organization. Read more at: http://commons.trincoll.edu/dataviz/public-private/

While you’re welcome to contact me at any time with questions, I’ll be sending you a mid-semester online intern evaluation on March 10th, and a final one in late April. Finally, I hope that you can attend ONE of our public presentations: Mon April 21st at 12 noon OR Wed Apr 23rd at 5:30pm, with details on our site.

regards,

Jack Dougherty, Trinity College
http://commons.trincoll.edu/jackdougherty