I chose to visualize the connection between ethnicity, poverty and COVID-19 cases in the San Francisco area. For a fact COVID-19 has disproportionately affected people of color, who make up the majority of people under the poverty line in the U.S. So, I wanted to represent that connection.
My original idea was to use a map to represent the poverty in different part of San Fran, and then layer overtop the amount of COVID cases in different districts as well as what ethnicity the majority of the people in those communities were. I decided against that, since to me it didn’t feel like the data visualization was actually 3d. It felt more as though I took a 2d project and made it 3d for the sake of being 3d.
Instead I decided to do a pie chart of gummy bears. Ethnicity is portrayed as the gummy bears’ color, bears on their sides represent the percentage of that population under the poverty line and any gummy bears which are missing are the ones who contracted the virus.
I think that I struggled most with the brain storming part for the project. I didn’t know how I wanted to represent the data, and to me my ideas didn’t feel that great, nothing special. I wanted to represent the data authentically and not skew the information with how I represented it.
For example, with the data sets I chose it makes more sense to show the cases of covid by ethnicity contrasted with the amount of the population from each ethnicity. That’s important as without that knowledge your understanding of the data is incorrect. If we look at the number of reported covid cases by those of European descent, it is much higher than that of those with African origins. So, one can say that the racial group most affected by covid is the European one, but the percentage of reported covid cases that are white are still less than the percentage of the population that is white.
The most time consuming part of this project was crunching the numbers. To figure out how many gummy bears I needed to take away I first got the percentage of cases in that ethnicity.( I divided 10o by the population from each ethnicity then multiplied it by the number of cases).(Then I took the number of gummy bears I had from each ethnicity divided it by 100 and multiplied it by the percentage of cases.)
Often Data can be hard to interpret so without proper data visualization it can be impossible to interpret correctly or accurately.
The materials I used are : Gummy bears, hot glue, glitter, foam board, beads and buttons
(screen shots of some of my data)