Wait, data is…fun?
Armed with an excel spreadsheet and a bad attitude, I took (poorly) to visualizing data I felt James Cameron, Celine Dion, hideous purple jewelry, and the 90s in general had already tortured me with.
“You’re so stupid Rose!”
Barf. I hate Titanic.
Not one to pour over fictionalized tragedy, an exercise in actual tragedy was also a dark starting point. We were using a partial data set from the real passenger manifest of the Titanic, provided by our fellow data science students. The surface details of 890 souls aboard, their fates either a one or a zero in a long column. Tough stuff to get excited about. Not to mention my near paralyzing hatred of spread sheets. I fully grasp their function, but I‘m a spoiled designer and like fun, bouncy, pretty things.
Regardless, I got to it. First venting to anyone near me, “I am finishing this project tonight! And not spending another GD minute on this yadda yadda yadda…”. You get the point.
Yearning to take a creative route, and knowing this could be my last moment as a true student, I decided upon three historical proto-personas and stories. Why not?
For a larger exploration, please see my prototype at InVision. >
Story One
Man wanting to marry off his son. He’s looking for a young, available lady of equal, or higher, class status. They are traveling second class.
From the portion of the manifest we were given, Mr. West’s goal is pretty doomed on many levels. Even using the legal age to wed in 1912, (12 for girls (!) and 14 for boys), there would only be 18 young ladies available. Not to mention the remarkable competitive disadvantage of many, many more young men aboard.
Story Two
Mom researching tickets for her family to voyage to America. She’s looking to go budget in either second or third class. Let’s hope she postponed the trip.
In actuality, this story revealed something pretty dark. When I dove into the largest families aboard their chances were some of the very worst.
The Sage family was a family of TEN people. Goodwin seven. Andersson, Asplund and Skoog, 6 people. All five members of the Rice family perished. In this entire group only 4 (women, all) survived in 40 total.
Final Dive
Finally, to acknowledge the dark root of the data set: A reporter trying to accurately report on the tragedy. Not interested in politicizing it, he wants to really articulate, visually, the true loss to England. The embarkment most affected (as my exploration in the numbers eventually reveals) by a horrifying level.
My final dashboard design was grounded most in this story, as it was a lot to unpack. The numbers continued to reveal deeper and deeper tragedy.
Well, by the end of this exercise, I realized I had actually spent days down the data hole. Not only did I NOT HATE translating the numberic to the visual, I had truly enjoyed creating a dashboard.
Daaang data, you got me.
If you made it this far, you should really check out the InVision prototype.
