What is Data? Reflection

My reflection on “What is Data?”

Computers are only as smart as one’s ability to program them. All the beautiful visualizations must be organized by someone. The computer requires someone to input the data and arrange it to communicate information in a meaningful way. Otherwise, there would be a bunch of nonsense information and no way to analyze and compare it. Data is the raw facts and raw numbers that when collected, give us information. Interestingly, data is more than just the numbers and individual words in a program to manipulate a website page or arranging information in figures. I never thought before that data is also the words in a book. Data is the content of articles. Data is the name, age, and breed of a dog, a person, or name and age of a historical landmark. As such, data is also the facts delivered through videos, as well as the exchanges of data to display the video on a website and play it.

This page from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, website contains an interactive tool and multiple visualizations to analyze historic federal disaster declarations by state, county, hazard, and year. FEMA combines list compound data and dictionary compound data. The visualizations after selecting a state or territory name, which is a text scalar value, from the drop down list display information specific to that state or territory. Then the number of disasters that have occurred, the months of when disasters occurred, the years of when the disasters occured, and the types of disasters that have occurred are shown with their own figures and tables. The number of disasters, months, and years, are number scalar values manipulated in different ways on the page. The types of disasters are text scalar values, and the pictures for types of disasters are blob scalar values. The FEMA is using a dictionary because I can look for the numbers, months, years, and types after selection of the state or territory.

The first visual uses a list to display the numbers of disasters along with the types, and a map. Hovering over the map will show the territory names and the numbers of disaster declarations, and hovering over the numbers of disasters shows a rank for them. Pictures for each disaster type are included, so the visualization looks less bland. However, some color rather than grayscale shades for the map would add more vibrance to the visualization as well. FEMA uses bar charts to show the months and years of the disaster occurrences. The bar chart showing the years of disasters looks too compressed compared to the bar chart for the months. It does give a good general overview of which years have the most disasters and includes the numbers of disasters, but a line graph would likely be more effective at communicating this information of change over time. FEMA uses a list to show the disasters that have occured in a chosen state with the titles of each column as follows: Year of Declaration Date, Declaration Title, and Disaster Number. A con to using a list is that the only way to view the information is by scrolling. It might be more effective if a timeline had been used.