Description of Visual:
Our main question for our visualization is “Which Area
is Attracting the most Theft?” For our data set, we analyzed January 2002 to
December 2011. We started the project by doing some data cleaning first and decided to not look at recent data due to the recent years
did not include location of where the crime of theft was committed. To answer our
main question, we decided to use a map of Chicago and a bar chart to highlight
which districts have the most number of theft during those particular years. We decided to visualize on a map to see the magnitude of crimes on a color scale. The
range of colors highlights the number of thefts in that district which the districts are represented in circles. The color scheme goes from yellow (least amount of theft) to brown
(greatest amount of theft). By using the same color coding, we created a bar graph of total crimes for each year. This allows the user to efficiently see which district has the most theft. On the bar
graph we noted that we excluded districts 13, 21, 23 and 31 due to these
districts not having enough significant data. We provided a drop down menu for both visuals
to let the user compare different years or look at all ten years as a whole. We
hope our choice of visualization will help the user understand the main question
that we are answering with the given data set of theft in Chicago.
Here are a few questions to get familiar with the visual:
1. From the bar graph, is there a noticeable increase or decrease in theft over the years?
2. Choose two years, look at which district has the least amount of theft and the most. Are these districts the same for both years?
3. Look at the map visual. By looking at it are you able to tell which area has the most amount of theft?
4. Using the bar graph, select all years. Which three districts had the highest theft rates?
1. It seems to decrease from 2002 to about 2007 and then stays consistent for the next years.
ReplyDelete2. 2002 and 2010. The most amount of theft is in district 18 and the least amount of theft is in district 15 during 2002. In 2010, the most amount of theft is in district 18 and the least amount of theft is in district 20. District 18 has the highest amount of theft in the years 2002 and 2010. The least amount of theft was between districts 15 and 20 during those years.
3. Yes, it looks more central to be the highest amount of theft.
4. District 18.
I really liked this visualization and thought it did a great job of answering the question, but there are a few things that I would change. I think that the legends and drop-down boxes should be adjusted to group the drop downs together, while the coloring should be changed to make the max and min more distinct. The bar graph is highly counter-intuitive, and I will discuss this more in question 4.
ReplyDelete1. The level of theft cannot be measured from this data (as the behavior of police is not constant over time), but we can see that the reporting of theft has steadily decreased over time.
2. In 2011, we can see that District 18 had the most reports of theft, while District 20 had the least, however, in 2010, District 18 also had the most reported theft, while a null district had the least, indicating that nulls are included in this dataset.
3. The map can easily lead the viewer to investigating two to three different choices between the max and min, but an adjustment of the coloring could make this more distinct.
4. The bar graph is incredibly difficult to read; when not even a tenth of the visualization can be seen, it is hard to expect the user to remember the height of nearly 100 different bars. I would suggest adding at least a reference line for the maximum value, that way the viewer knows which district has the highest reported theft. Because there is a parameterized selector for the year, I would suggest reducing the scope of the bar graph to accommodate that, as the oscillatory nature of the years creates an incredibly confusing situation for the viewer.