For this assignment the class was asked to create a chart and some sort of graph to display information and statistics that pertain to Roger Williams University. After the new year, Facebook had several applications that created interesting visuals for Facebook stats like most used words for status updates, places visited, etc. and I decided to make a visual for the locations within New England of my Roger Williams friends. While this might not actually be important information for the school itself, I thought it would be interesting way to display a fun fact for me. After searching through a random selection of 100 friends from Facebook I simply counted up the number of friends from the various states of New England with Massachusetts claiming the most with 38, next Connecticut with 18, Rhode Island with 10, New Hampshire with 9, and Vermont and Maine tied in last with 5 while 16 friends were from other states outside of New England. For the table part of our assignment I decide to list the states in descending order in order to show the significance of which states had the most amount of friends. Next step was to take this information from the table and make a graph of some sort. During class we looked at several different options such as bar graphs, line graphs, and pie charts however I thought of making a graph that used the shapes of the states. For this graph I took each state, making sure they were the all the same size, and scaled them appropriately based on the amount of friends from each state in Adobe Photoshop. In order to also show the difference between states with more friends than others, I added a transparency to the states with fewer friends so they would look more faded compared to states with more friends. Finally I added labels for the states as well as the number of friends from each state. Since I had space at the bottom of the graph, I added the chart as well to add additional information for the graph and create a more cohesive presentation.
Overall I enjoyed this assignment in that it allowed us to show different means of presenting data and statistics however I am not completely happy with my results. The final graph that was created did not come out as I had pictured it in my head, which was mainly due to the different shapes and sizes of the states. While looking at a map, we inherently know that a state like Maine is larger than a state like Rhode Island so when I re-scaled the states in order to represent the number of friends from that state, it threw off the viewer when looking at the map. Also, in the case of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, the re-scaled states maintained a similar scale and proportion of the actual states and therefore do not read as the data would in a chart. What was interesting while using this graph was a pattern of a majority of friends are from southern New England rather than Northern New England and is something that I do not think would show in another type of graph. Overall a bar graph would have better displayed the information but I kept the state graph mainly due to my aesthetic appeal to it.
Nick... I do like what you've done. I especially like the way you made the sizes of the states relative to the population. It was not the way the rest of the class went -- using Excel to create a pie or bar graph. I hope that you use this for the basis of your multivariate display project. Nicely done.
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