Redesign assignments

In this part, I put each data of states on the US map and national data on the top,
because I like the idea of image to characterize each states.
When you click on the map, detail will be shown.


To illustrate the comparison between states in a single sight, I made the sizes of states to
be proportionate to the percentages. Also I put colors according to the number of percentage.
Detailed data of each states are shown when clicked.
I was totally inspired by the election map of New York Times.

(The data on this map are mock.)



Thorne re-visualization of teacher salary data

Text reads:

– Questions this visualization doesn’t answer: What IS the “average worker’s salary”? Who’s the “average worker”? (that info’s buried at the bottom)

– Visualization is just unappealing to look at – why the gray sketches of dated-looking teachers? Also, the size and colors have no correlation to what the numbers are.

– Ideally, I’d want to make it so that when you mouse over the apples, they fill in (with each apple representing $10,000, or maybe 5-10 percent over the average salary) according to how much teachers in each state make. Alternately: Instead of apples, have school supplies – to make the point that more money = more resources.

Design Assignment by Ezra Eeman.

I liked how National Geographic tried to come up with a different design to show the flux of foreign-exchange high school students. However I missed a clear geographical representation. I tried solve this by keeping the original colored bands but adding a world map.

Somehow I knew that I had seen this idea before. Turns out our good old friend Charles Joseph Minard drew a world map of migration using the same principle.


Analysis of teacher salary data visualization in “Good”

This data visualization is attractive, but not very effective. The main flaws are:

-Information not arranged in any order whatsoever – not in order of size, not geographically, not even alphabetically – so it is extremely difficult to navigate.

-The visuals are solely decorative – there appears to be no significance in the choice of figure/profile/sketches (the little drawing of a person) or the colors used. This is a wasted opportunity and also makes it confusing to the reader.

-It feels cluttered. On my computer, at least, it’s impossible to look at the whole image at one time. In order to be able to do this, one would have to a) either make the text so small as to be illegible or b) print out the data visualization to poster-size

-The presentation, particularly the premise and the headline, feel somewhat manipulative and intellectually dishonest, as if this is designed to illustrate that teachers have it pretty good, rather than designed to accurately assess the situation. Why, if each state has a comparison of average teacher salary and average white-collar salary, is the national comparison not also provided? And why not provide that for Canada as well? Also, it fails to take into account both a) the time teachers are required to invest outside of class (and often off-site) for lesson-planning and grading and b) the intensity of the work on-site. An hour in a classroom with kids is far more demanding/intensive than an hour in most office jobs, in which there is more flexibility about things like bathroom breaks and personal phone calls. I hope this at least had some text/analysis alongside this, with experts asked to explain the figures and perhaps put them in context. Also, it would be useful to make an attempt to analyze why the disparities are so great from state to state. Why, for example, are DC teacher salaries relatively low and Florida and Pennsylvania teacher salaries relatively high?

To improve this, I would add some of the above caveats and analysis. In addition, I would either visualize it as a map, perhaps with each state colored a different shade depending on how high the average teacher salary was or the percentage higher than average white-collar salary (maybe five discrete shades, with darkest for highest salaries/highest differential and palest for lowest salary/differential). Ideally, you could click on each state and up would pop two profile/figures or at least bars, one representing the teacher’s salary, one representing the average white-collar salary. These figures/profiles/bars would be to scale – so if the teacher salary is four times the average the teacher image would be four times as tall as the average white-collar image.

Another option would be to do a bar graph in order from highest to lowest so the viewer could easily see which state is highest and which is lowest and have them ranked. The bar graph could feature for each state a bar for teacher and a bar for white-collar average, or it could simply have the y-axis not be average salary but percentage differential (ie. in Florida, teachers make 65.2 percent above average worker salary, so the number on the y-axis would be 65.2). To make it more attractive, you could replace the bars with some kind of teacher-related image, like an apple, or even a human figure.