By Tyler Dimond
After downloading the data set that included popular baby names in relation to gender, I uploaded this data into Flourish to try to visualize it in a way that makes it easy to look at. After trying a few different graphing methods I landed on the final product below.
This is referred to as a “radial graph”. I chose this because it shows every name and gives us a bar to show us generally how each one relates to the other with relevance to the count. While it would be easier to visualize which named are more popular if we lined the bars up next to each other on a clean line rather than on a curve, you can hover over each bar to see the count. I also really enjoy how they have the lines that branch to each name which connects by gender which may not be the most relevant for this exact dataset because it’s only two groups, but would be really cool to see with more categories. I still think this way of visualizing the data makes it clean to look at because at least we can see which names for boys and girls are more popular based on counts in their own respective gender categories.
As you can see from this second radial graph, the data is a lot harder to look at because the bars are not organized by height(count) and so you’d actually have to hover over each bar to understand how big or small the actual count would be. I changed this, as you can see from my first image, to align them in order of bar height to make it easier to look at and understand. Lin’s lecture explained that importance of comparing heights as human’s because we can process it a lot easier than if we tried to make a pie chart of these counts.