Using a data set that recorded the top ten baby names in New Zealand between the years 2001 and 2010, I created this visualization on Flourish.
Upon looking at the data set, I was really interested in how name popularity changed over time. I explored visualizations on both Flourish and Rawgraphs.io to see what my options were. After attempting to use the features that auto-generate/suggest visualizations for your data, I decided that I needed to be more intentional and look beyond the immediate suggestions. At first, I looked for a visualization to show change over time, but I felt like these showed too much information at once, so I shifted to hierarchical visualizations. I was pleased to discover that you can add a change over time component to hierarchical visualizations in Flourish!
Ultimately, I chose the circle hierarchy option, and customized it so that there were two different hierarchies: one for female names and one for male names. Within those circles, the popularity of the top 10 names is portrayed by the varying radii of the circles. I also added a change over time feature that allows the user to change which year they are looking at so they can see how the sizes of each name change. After getting the visualization to show what I wanted, I adjusted the colors and formatting and added a title. This visualization works well for the data set because it’s easy to tell which names were most popular in a given year, and the slider/interactivity make it easy to tell how popularity changes over time.
I was pleasantly surprised by how easy and fun it was to use Flourish and customize my visualization. I think it was important to look at the data first, per Lin’s suggestion, and decide what story I wanted to tell before diving in to my final visualization. I also tried to keep Lin’s design advice in mind while customizing. For example, I decided not to include the name “count” in the circle–the user can always hover over a name and get the count, but I felt that always showing it made the visualization too busy. I think interactive digital visualizations are a really cool and powerful tool for the digital humanities because it’s an engaging way to show off findings. I’d much rather play around with an interactive graph than look at one in a book.