assignments – Page 3 – 2015 Data Storytelling Studio @ MIT

How much do fruits/vegetables cost in Boston?

In this chart, we chose to explore the concept of small multiples — inspired by this Quartz chart of alcohol consumption around the globe, we wanted to compare the prices of different food groups over time. To accomplish this, we used the USDA’s Quarterly Food-at-Home Price Database, which measures how much each food group costs to Americans. We specifically focused on the Boston demographic (due to time constraints we were only able to process the data for the first subset — fruits and vegetables). Using csvkit we cleaned and extracted the data we needed, then visualized everything using the D3 charting library, though the graphs are not interactive at the moment.

The audience for this graphic is people in Boston who are the primary grocery shoppers in their households — we wanted to give a perspective on how food prices changed over the 2004-2010 period (there was an invalid data point that made it through on the “canned select nutrients” graph). We can see that the price of fruits and vegetables in Boston have been increasing gradually. There are a few areas for improvement: first of all, the graphs aren’t adjusted for inflation, so we don’t have the right context for the graphic. In retrospect, we probably should not have used the same axes for all the graphs since the per unit price is pretty different between them and it’s hard to see the actual change. Moreover, 100g is kind of an arbitrary amount and might not be an intuitive unit to think about food consumption in.

See the graphic in full size: http://s2tephen.github.io/qfahpd/

Women Artists at the Tate

By Team Aartvark (Desi + Laura)

For the chart assignment, we made a infographic with two types of charts. On the top of the infographic, we includes rows of pie charts that demonstrate the men and women artists represented in the Tate’s collection by decade of birth. This visualization was inspired by the “small multiples” that Tufte recommends (and that Rahul showed in class). The second chart is a traditional line graph that shows how the ratio of artists represented in the Tate’s collection changes over time. The chart is intended for a general audience that is interested in art. Our goal was to reveal how museum collections are biased toward male artists, but that their biases are slowly changing, and that museums today are now endeavoring to have a more equitable gender distribution in their collections.

How much water goes into a meal?

a super awesome chart by Alyssa and Nolan

DATA: We looked at a spreadsheet from a LA Times article on the amount of water consumed or polluted in the creation of many different kinds of food. We then transferred that data into another Excel spreadsheet to turn the original data, presented in cubic meters of water per ton of food, into a more easily conceptualized metric: bathtubs of water per serving. For the sake of expedience we estimated a 100-gram serving, which is reasonable for most foods, and determined that a “standard” bathtub was about 25 gallons.

CHART: For a few example meals that a college student might eat, we wanted to show what foods consumed the most water. Unsurprisingly, meat consumes quite a lot of water, but so do dairy products in some cases. Vegetables, however, don’t really need that much water for the most part. We generated this graphic using Python’s numpy and matplotlib modules.

GOALS:

-Make people realize what the environmental impact of their dietary choices is.

-Help them understand where the bulk of their environmental impact is (meat and dairy products)

-Hopefully the visual impact of this chart will make them think a bit when shopping for food.

AUDIENCE: This might be useful to post in a grocery store or dining hall so people buying food can pause to reflect as they are planning meals for the week. Since we explain water use in terms of bathtubs and the graph is helpfully color-coded and labeled, and since most Americans are fairly chart-literate, the barrier to understanding what this chart says is not great. For greatest impact, it might be most useful to show to college students, who are still building their food purchasing and meal planning habits, so they have that in the back of their minds as they plan meals and form their dietary habits.

Breaking the Stereotype on SNAP Recipients

Tuyen, Deborah, Hayley

Conservative media and lawmakers often perpetuate harmful stereotypes about SNAP recipients, often insinuating they are irresponsible and “undeserving” of the benefits they receive. For example, Donney Furgerson, Republican Senior Stockman’s Senior Communications and Policy Advisor criticized SNAP as a “liberal stunt” of the economic growth while supporting the cut-down of the SNAP benefits. Our goal is to take a closer look at one such stereotype, that SNAP recipients prioritize “junk food” over more nutritious options and show the story is much more nuanced and complicated.

In fact, data from the Food Insecurity Among Somerville SNAP Contingent survey show that people with SNAP want to eat more fruits and vegetables, but that the main barrier is money and access.

Our chart is intended for an audience who is not food insecure – we aim to build understanding and empathy by telling this story. Our visual is a series of pie charts in the shape of various foods. The sentences that accompany the charts describe the data and the reality of SNAP recipients. For example, nearly 50% of the participants in the Somerville survey on SNAP recipients said they rarely or never bought junk food; at the same time, 39.3% of participants said nutrition would be a higher priority “if money were not such a pressing issue.” Finally, there is clear demand for fruits and vegetables – a separate survey, conducted by the Somerville Institute for Community Health showed that 59% of respondents wanted to see more farmer’s markets in their neighborhood, and 30% a “green grocer/produce seller.”

Our first take-on was Google Chart:

However, we felt constrained by the options in Google Chart. So, we went back to the traditional pens and crayons.

The two different methods helped us organize our presentation ideas. We decided to create the final version of our data charts by using Picktochart. We also added new data from a national survey on how often Americans buy “junk food” in order to provide some context to compare our Somerville data.

Creative Chart: Adult Obesity in the U.S.

Danielle Man, Edwin Zhang, Harihar Subramanyam, Tami Forrester

View the chart here

Data

We looked at the USDA Food Environment Atlas, which provides various metrics about food availability, health, and more for each county in the U.S. Specifically, we aimed to understand the severity of obesity around the U.S. and identify the states/counties in which obesity is particularly severe.

Chart

For each county, we looked at the percentage of obese adults (in 2010). We turned this into a nested treemap using d3. The advantage of the nested treemap is that we can quickly glance to see the percentages by state, and we can drill down to see the percentages by county. One way a treemap is better than a geographic map is that in the treemap counties/states are similar in size, whereas in a geographic map small counties/states may not be noticeable.

Audience

While the visual can be understood by a general audience, we are particularly interested in people from counties/states with high obesity levels. We hope they are interested by their county/state’s location on the chart and try to learn why some places have higher obesity levels than others (a question that we hope to address in our project).

Goals

Our goals with this chart are to

Show how obesity is spread throughout the U.S.
Allow viewers to see the prevalence of obesity within their county
Have a tool our group can use when we investigate the link between poor neighborhoods and food insecurity

Treemap drilldown

Creative Chart: Where is the Water Going?

Val Healy & Ceri Riley

Here’s a link to the online version of this infographic (it has an interactive bit that doesn’t show up in the .png version).

Our targeted audience for this infographic was around a high school age, but also understandable and relevant to adults. The goals were to communicate how much water individuals use on a daily basis but also trying to put in perspective the massive amount of water that the agricultural industry uses. Our ‘call to action,’ although it’s a little weaker/implied here rather than well-developed, is that rather than advocating solely for lifestyle changes, we should think about ways to change the institutions that take up the most water — such as by working on more efficient irrigation systems and revised farming practices (like the times at which certain crops are planted).

Essentially, we tried to use one of the online infographic tools (Piktochart) to visually represent the different ways water was used by the state of California in 2010, show what an individual’s daily water use (minus food) would look like, and then connect to the larger idea that agriculture uses tons of water and the practices should be revised.

Rethinking Water Consumption

For this assignment, we were challenged to remix the Good magazine water infographic into an interactive, participatory experience. In our design, users can visualize their own water usage by selecting the activities they undertook that day.

We found that the original infographic, organized in columns with options like “apple” vs. “orange,” or “toilet” vs. “low-flow toilet,” could serve as the interface from which a user select items. On another screen or window, a bar graph would dynamically fluctuate as the participant indicates his or her water consumption. The height of each bar is proportional to how much water each activity or product requires. We also maintained the color-coding from the original chart: bars with blue indicate direct use of water, while green indicates the water used to make that item the user the consumed. By recreating this infographic into an interactive chart, we personalize the understanding of water consumption, allowing users to apply the information in the original infographic to their own lives.

Water Visualization Map Remix

Team: Hayley Song, Tuyen Bui, Deborah Chen

Remix Technique: Map

We used mapping as the visualization remix method to represent various direct and indirect water consumption in a household. To this end, we decided to draw an outline of a house and map different uses of water inside the house.

water_remix

The data shown in the original infographic was for a period of 24 hours, but we decided to construct a story by focusing on our daily actions rather than the flow of time. Additionally, the original visualization shows a comparison of the water usage between appliances with different levels of efficiency (e.g. high efficiency washing machine vs regular), but we’ve chosen to focus just on regular usage and make this the dominant narrative.

The size of each room is proportional to the amount of water that directly or indirectly results in water waste.

Each room shows the key causes of water waste within the room. The kitchen is drawn the biggest and is placed in the center of the house to highlight it produces the most water waste in the house. The steak and wine, in the middle of the kitchen are the major causes of indirect water waste in the kitchen. The bathroom has a bathtub, a shower and a sink; the laundry room contains a washing machine.

We indicated the amount of waste by the size and the number of water drops under each component. Future work would involve adding the numerical quantity of how much water was used.

Water Remix

Val Healy & Ceri Riley

We remixed the water usage infographic into a map, specifically focusing on the food components rather than the appliances.

This map shows one’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner plates, scaled to represent the relative amounts of water these meals virtually use. In addition to the plates themselves being proportional to water use, the foods and drinks on the plates are also proportional to their respective water footprints. The blue pie slice of the plate represents how much water you would use if you chose the “better” option for your meal — for example, the chicken, beer, and baked potato dinner would only use about 20% of the virtual water that the steak, wine, and bread dinner would.

If we were to actually develop this visualization rather than just sketch it out, we hoped to show the old vs new plate maps for each meal. If you hovered over the blue region of a given plate, you would be shown a proportionally smaller plate with the new foods arranged on it by virtual water use. This would allow for quick visual comparison between two meal options. And, if you hovered over any given food, you would be shown the amount of virtual water (in gallons) that was required to grow it and/or its percent contribution to the total virtual water use of the meal. So our food map visualization would look simple at first, but ultimately contain a lot of the same numerical data that the original dataset included.

Water Remix

Team Members:

Edwin Zhang

Danielle Man

Water Data Remix!

Our group was tasked with taking the original water usage data and providing a way to communicate it by making it interactive.

Looking at the data, we found that while some of the information involving direct water use was more obvious, the amount of water ‘virtually’ used for common products was the most surprising. In one example, an item like steak is illustrated as consuming 1500 ‘virtual’ gallons of water.

Though the virtual gallons of water are not directly used in say, feeding a cow that would later become steak, the the amount of water reported in the sheet is to envision the water used in processes that lead to the end product.

As a way to envision the amount of water involved in both the processes and the actual water used directly, we decided that it would be interesting to have an ‘exhibit.’ By filling up water balloons one at a time and exchanging them for tickets, a person could then exchange those tickets for various items. In doing so, a person could better understand the differences between the amount of water consumed for each item by engaging in an amount of work reflective of the water consumption.