This week in class we discussed how data visualization (viz) is an interesting and helpful tool in internet storytelling. Data viz is used by many different news and online sources to illustrate statistics in an easy way to readers. One example I found of data viz is about teen pregnancy rates in the United States, published in September 2011. Instead of just giving out the information in article form, pregnantteenhelp.org used a bar graph to illustrate how many American teens got pregnant per year. Though it is a reliable source and a well put together graph, it would have been a good idea for the site to show a bigger image of the graph to read it better.
Another example of data viz is on The New York Times’ website today accompanying the story “Rates of A.D.H.D Diagnosis in Children.” The article discusses the number of both male and female children who have been diagnosed with A.D.H.D according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. They show both a map and a graph to illustrate gender, age, and location of the diagnoses.
One of the biggest and most well known data visualizations is google trends. Users can type anything into the search box and see how it has been searched for on google over the last few years in graph form, maps, and a list of related searches. The graphs are large and very easy to understand. This could be especially helpful for journalists or students working on research projects to track popularity and prevalence of specific topics per year.
I specifically chose these three because they are different ways that data viz is used on the internet. I’m sure that once this technology becomes even easier to work with, it will become more commonly used throughout a variety of online media.
Sammie Says 