Following the Data

Looking at good examples of Data Viz

I looked into a few Data Visualization blogs: ProPublica, FiveThirtyEight, and FlowingData. Data is the most effective when it has a simple to understand interface but visually striking in order to get across the gravity of the data. One such visualization is on the ProPublica article “New Records Show the NYPD’s Favored Punishment: Less Vacation Time” by Moiz Syed and Derek Willis. The article itself has less than 400 words because the data speaks for itself. The article has organized 1300 complaint cases of NYPD officers who received punishment via lost vacation days. It gives the reader a few ways to search: you can directly search the officer by name and find their badge number, complaint, and the amount of vacation days said officer lost. One can also search by incident with buttons labeled “arrest”, “force”, “frisk”, “chokehold” as not each case has the same amount of days taken away. Finally, you can use a sliding scale of vacation days lost. For example, if you scrolled to “5 vacation days lost” it would list all the cases with overhead caption “813 cases resulting in only a loss of 5 vacation days” and the only speaks volumes. It presents seemingly overwhelming data easily. It gives the reader a grim realization that the NYPD gives officers with multiple complaints essentially a slap on the wrist with lost vacation time and that it is not an isolated issue. It gives people who may have made these complaints an easy to use database to see how their voice was heard or really not heard.