On Oct 18th, we have gone to the field trip to ProPublica and NYU Data Services. ProPublic is an non-profit institute that involves on data visualization in journalism. In NYU Data Services, we had a lecture and received a lot of useful information.
In ProPublica, we learned about the project called Bombs in Your Backyard. The project is done well from the copy to the visualization itself. The title "Bombs in Your Backyard" is very eye-catching and after learning the project people don't think it is too extracting.
https://projects.propublica.org/bombs/
The colors they chose were also very smart. The blue color often represents calm and safe, and red often represents warning and danger. They had considered this consent and applied it into their visualization. In the same time, they used small dots to represent old army factories which the more dense areas means more factories in the areas.
I also thought that the overall topic is very great. I think everyone would like to put in their address and see if there is anything around the neighborhood. I have also tried to put my address and surprisedly to find out dangers are close to us.
In the one hour lecture, we were given a lot of tips about data visualization. From every basic elements like colors to shapes to deep information for data visualization, the lecture is very rich. There are a few examples that are very impressive. The first one is that never use pie-chart. It is because people is very poor on comparing angles. When there are two similar angels, it is very hard for people to recognize which one is bigger. Another impressive example is the chart from best data visualization to poor visualization. We can see that how important some of the decisions are in data visualization.
After visiting the NYU Data Services, I also learned that we can request for sessions for groups or individual to get helps with our projects or just software in general. I will definitely use the resource to get some help on my project!