How Deep Is Your Love?
The master’s program at CUNY J-School “has no chill.” One week, we’re learning how to use databases to gather interesting sets of numbers (like water consumption or farmers markets in NYC), the next we’re using Quartz’s Chartbuilder to make graphs and Adobe Illustrator to enhance said graphs. What I’ve learned over the last couple of weeks is that sometimes great information is hidden beyond the eye. For the following chart, I analyzed the use of buses, suburban rail, bikes, and ferries to enter midtown Manhattan from 2003 to 2013.
“You see, everything that you teach us takes us twice the time to understand,” Shane told out prof. The rest of us nodded our heads and sighed out several “yeahs” in agreement. Understanding data is no easy job.
I pulled information from yearly reports provided by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council into a clean Excel spreadsheet where I wrote the years down one column and had the number of rides of each mode of transportation for each respective year going across the rows. Once done with this sheet, I copied all of the numbers in Chartbuilder and decided to present the information through a line chart.
I initially wanted to include the numbers for subway riders but was forewarned not to by my professor because it would cause a “scale problem”:while suburban peaks just over 300,000 daily riders subway ridership is in the millions. This would have led to a skewed chart, with the four other modes of transportations several hundreds of thousands of riders away from the number of subway riders. This would not only look weird, but it would diminish the importance of these other modes of transportation, making their numbers insignificant. What did I learn from those numbers after all?
Bicycle use to enter NYC has risen nearly 10 times more than subway usership has risen from 2003 to 2013.
To be honest, I was pretty disappointed when I looked at measly squiggles in the lines: I expected that the 11-year-period would’ve seen a dramatic use of each of these modes of transportation but then it occurred to me — let me actually crunch some numbers (aka, analyze it rather than just showing the raw information):
The increase in bicycle usage may not appear as impressive on the line chart but the percentage says a lot. I calculated percent change and found that bus usage went up 2.88%, suburban rail use went up 7.65%, bicycle usage went up an impressive 203.23%, and ferry use went down 19.97%. or by comparison, I also calculated the subway usage had gone up 22.1%. This makes me wonder if I actually should have created an accompanying graph in which I compared the percentages to place the transportations modes’ usage in perspective. Not surprisingly, in my professor’s critique she said:
“The conclusion you reach at the end — this line chart doesn’t show the crazy percent change in bicycling very well — is also worth thinking about. The percent change chart would probably have been a more dramatic way to show this data. When we think more about the context of the story we’d be trying to tell, it would have allowed us to show all modes without the subway wildly dominating AND it would have allowed for some nice context.”
We’ve already moved a bit past charts and have started to use data to map charts. By the end of class on Thursday, many of us were still trying to grasp the many possibilities Adobe Illustrator gives us to get creative with data (using different layers to manipulate existing images and make our own maps, lasso and crop tools, hiding layers, etc.) As I mentioned in my first post, this is a journey us noobs are on together. With a lot of patience and practice, we’re learning a whole lot.
In exchange for fear of numbers has arrived a familiarity of looking at them. Cells. Rows. Sets. Percentages. The data draw me into this portal where I’m meant to make sense of them, find new meaning, and figure out how to present them. Reminiscent of elevator music that plays on the way to your destination, the data sing to me “How Deep Is Your Love” as though I owe them my devotion.
