Unit 13: Data Visualization



For the data visualization project, I pulled information about population in counties of Virginia from 1790-2000 from the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). I narrowed my data visualization down from every county in Virginia to those in what I would consider Northern Virginia. Many of the counties, including Alexandria and Prince William, did not have sufficient data to make meaningful entries in the chart. I chose to capture 1900-2000, as opposed to 1800-1900, because of the amount of information available.

I found this project very challenging, both in terms of finding the data set, and in formatting the above chart using Google Charts. The search functionality in the NHGIS system was not intuitive and the sheer breadth of information available was overwhelming. I pulled several sets of data before deciding on county population changes. It is easy to see a far and away change in Fairfax County, which in 2000 was at a whopping 969,749 people.

In terms of Google Charts, I was surprised at the level of HTML/ Javascript required, and it took me longer than I would have liked to figure out the appropriate tables and codes to set up the line graph. Luckily there are many tutorials online to guide the novice, and plenty of codes to paste together. I will keep Google Charts in mind for future projects, and would like to spend some time working on the more advanced features.

I will be updating my blog today or tomorrow with a link to my draft final project. I hope to make some headway today.

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