week5-truongshan-Shannon-Truong

week1.md

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+<img src="images/COVIDRiskiestActivities.png" width="1000">
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+The above image is of the visualization of the riskiest activities that would expose someone to COVID-19. This visualization was taken from https://informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/covid-19-coronavirus-infographic-datapack/#activities.
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+With the first week focusing on the type of data and more on the introduction of the perception of data based on the person and their preferences, there are some points that should be made about this particular visualization. At first glance, I thought the style of commenting on the visualization was very interesting. Directly commenting on an activity seem to be a warning or a piece of advice about that particular activity. These are done with a white dotted outline of an arc of the activity circle. While the visual does specify that the data was taken from 500+ epidemiologists and health professionals, it seems that the size of the circle representing each activity corresponds to the amount of professionals that agree with the riskiness. I think the size of the activity circle can be very misleading as there isn't really an explanation to what it represents and the size difference is also just so minor that it can be hard to miss; unless we compare the smaller more uniform sized circles in the "Low Risk" category to the largest "Nightclub" circle in the high risk category. Consequently, the intensity of color moving from the low risk to the high risk category seem to convey the change in risk factor much better for me. We associate red as a sign of "DANGER" and with the highest risk and biggest circle being "Nightclub" it really draws our attention and conveys that danger in a really effective way. We can also see the change in color hues when we glance at the two ends of the visual: the low risk and the high risk category. With this said, I thought the idea behind the visual was pretty simple and the simplistic design here conveyed the information and data in an overall effective way.
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+For my reaction to the data as a consumer, I think that this data further supports the importance of being safe right now. The creator of this visual had a list of factors at the top left hand corner that was taken into account when placing the activities into their respective categories. I think as a consumer I'd like to further develop or add an additionally visual indicating the severity of the different factors for each individual activity. 

week2.md

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+<img src="images/poppyfield.png" width="1000">
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+Above is an interactive visualization that can be found at http://poppyfield.org/.
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+The visualization itself presents data in a form of the poppy flower and when hovered over, it specifies which war each data point (in this case each flower) represents. The size of the flower indicates the number of deaths from the war that each flower represents. When clicked upon, each flower would reveal information for its respective war including information specific information on total fatalities, the duration of the war, the war participants, and further details. The visualization is great in that the user can also filter the data to only show wars by location, by the number of fatalities, and by the time if the user is looking for wars in a specific time period. 
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+It is important to note that the center of the flower is where the viewer should be looking at as it indicates the actual data point in relation to the axis. I thought what really drew me to this specific visualization was the choice of graphics and how interesting the poppy flower looked. Before I even got to know the data and what it was about, I think the creator really grasped the audience's attention with the way she conveyed the data. The user expereince in this vis is amazing. I really liked the interactivity and how easy it is really use and view the data. I think the choices in sliders and other capabilities is very natural for users and I don't think there was anything confusing or misleading about the presentation of the data. 
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+Additionally, to add more about the creativity behind the vis, we can see from the vis and data that there are several times in history where there are higher concentrations of war, therefore, for this graphic there is a higher more intense concentration of data points in certain areas. I thought it was so interesting how the creator used the stem of the poppy flower data points to spread the data and make use of the space she had rather than clustering the data in one certain area. While the stems do somewhat indicate the duration of the war it represents (the stem would start where the war began and the center of the flower data point would be where it ended), it definitely made the vis more readable in this case. 
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+Overall, I really enjoyed this visualization and how easily accessible it was for the viewers to understand. 

week3.md

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+<img src="images/NewYorkTimesCOVID.jpg" width="1000">
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+Above is a visualization that can be found at https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/02/21/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf. Ths was also on the front page of the New York Times February 21, 2021. This may need to be viewed on the actual page where we find to article in order for the visualization to be clearer. 
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+After reading and seeing this visualization of the progression of COVID in the paper, I was really drawn to how the newspaper decided to display data in this long bar. I was really drawn to the intensity of the dots that are drawn on the visualization. As we move from the top of the mapped data to the bottom, you can see that as we continue to go down, data being mapped progresses with time. 
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+The intensity of the clustering of the dots is really interesting. On the right side of the bar, we can see notes given to us as the increase of deaths from COVID increases at 50,000 deaths per interval. With each dot representing one death, it was really shocking to see how the rate of deaths increased so much as we continued to go towards the bottom. This can be seen as the bar got increasing way darker at the bottom. This was due to how the rate increased from around 60 days to accumulate 50,000 COVID deaths to just merely 15 days recently. 
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+While the information being conveyed was the main reason why I chose this visualization and was interested, I further thought that the monochrome color system was really cool. In past visualizations, the interaction of the visualization as well as the vibrant colors is usually what draws me in first, however, with this visualization, it only needed the few colors it utilizes to be effective in conveying their data and peaking interest and understanding. This further was really cool for me to see and it seemed like a new sort of "style" of visualization than what I had previously seen and looked for in a vis. 

week4.md

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+<img src="images/theOffice.png" width="1000">
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+Above is a visualization that can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/lulc9h/interaction_graph_of_18_characters_in_the_office/. 
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+The initial reason why I chose this visualization was because The Office is one of my favorite TV Shows. Upon further viewing and analysis of the vis, I found the spatial aspect of where the characters were placed around the graph to be really strategic. I noticed that the characters with the most interaction with one another (Michael, Pam, Jim, and Dwight) were placed not clustered together, but at different points around the graph. I wonder if this would improve the perception of data and make the data more readable for the viewer. 
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+Another aspect of the graph that I thought was important is in regards to the thickness and boldness of the lines that represent the interaction between characters. I thought the creator's idea to do this was really interesting because color also played a role in this aspect. While the lines got bolder as the interactions between the characters started to increase, the color and darkness of the color also increased. I thought this was a really intuitive means to get the point across to the viewer of the data.
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+While I'm not sure what I would do to improve the vis, I think adding a mouseover event to show more detailed data would be a neat idea. I think that the while I mentioned above the lines are really intuitive to the viewer (so much so there doesn't appear to be an explanation to explain this on the vis) a mouseover event to clarify the data and present more data to the viewer would be beneficial. Additionally, commenting on the color, the characters with lesser interactions also seem to have lighter colors to represent this which may be difficult to see. Finally, adding this feature would be really beneficial to show the scale of the graph and what constitutes the thickness and boldness of the lines. 

week5.md

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+<img src="images/LifeExpectancy.png" width="1000">
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+Above is a visualization that can be found at https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/m0i3gy/oc_asian_countries_are_chasing_up_to_european/. 
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+The video clip of the visualization displays how over time, the life expectancy since 1950 has shifted. Historically, the life expectancy of European nations have been higher than most other countries in the world. Since recently, beginning at the early 2000s, Asian countries have inched up the list of top 10 countries with the highest life expectancies. In 2019, 4/10 Asian countries were in the top ten with 2 listing at the top 3. Some of these asian countries include Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Cyprus. 
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+The interactive visualization was really interesting to me at first glance because all the features were set on the side of the vis. The slider allows the user to be able to shift through the year and visualize the top 10 countries with the highest life expectancy easily. It allows the user to view the data of at that particular year. I thought that since we are working on different mappings of one visualization while also recently being introduced to user interactions, this was a really neat way to allow for more usability. This technique has been used a lot in the past and other visualizations I've seen. 
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+The only suggestions and confusion that I had when viewing this briefly was on the side bar, it displayed a list of countries. With no description that I could find, this list of countries was very confusing. I would assume that that's the list of countries that has every appeared on the chart throughout the years but I'm not sure. This was very unclear for me.
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+Overall, I thought that this visualization was really well put together and it allowed for user interaction which is always a cool technical and design feature to me.