Environment and Climate: Representing Catastrophe
Class: VCD10 - Data Visualization
Co-Creator: Malachi Snyder
We were tasked with choosing a topic related to the environment, sourcing and compiling data into spreadsheets, and creating a narrative that both represented the data and told a story. We wanted to focus on waste production globally and see if there were any correlations that could predict for the varying amounts by country. Pulling data from the World Bank, we compared factors like population size, population density, location, affluence, and GDP. We ultimately found that the strongest correlate with waste production was GDP.
From this data, we initially wanted to tell the story of this correlation by ranking the countries by GDP and waste production separately, and then drawing lines to connect the graphs. This quickly became confusing and messy, so we instead chose to organize the countries by name. This method improved the clarity of the data, but at the expense of a clear narrative. We then decided to change our narrative to focus on individual countries, since the alphabetical order made finding individual countries much easier. This pivot allows the audience to look at which countries have high GDP despite low amounts of waste production, which countries have low GDP and high waste production, and the general trend that GDP and waste production seem to be close in value relative globally.
