1. Data Visualization

2. Infographic
Infographics are less technical or academic and are designed to appeal to a popular audience. They are effective at presenting noteworthy data in high in a salient way. Many infographics combine more than one sources.
Tools: PowerPoint, Photoshop, Venngage, Piktochart, or Canva.

7. The more things change…
In this infographic, I used data from the following sources:
General Social Science Survey
Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index
Wikipedia
a 2014 CNN/ORC poll
A small study from 1984 by Gaziano
Audience: politically active, adult, online news website reader
Purpose: show differences between 1984 and 2014 (30 years)
Tool: I used PowerPoint and a template from Hubspot
Time: it took my 3.5 hours to research and design

8. Other sources I could have used for this
The Bureau of Labor Statistics “Databases, Tables & Calculators by Subject” [select “top picks”]
U.S. Census “Current Population Survey”
U. of Minnesota “Integrated Public Use Microdata Series”
The People History Price Basket

9. Tag Cloud
A Tag Cloud or Word Cloud is a weighted list that increases the size of a word the more frequently it appears in a corpus (a group of words).
Tools: Wordle (cannot use Chrome), WordClouds, Tricklar, TagCrowd

10. William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

11. Coca Cola Wikipedia entry

12. Taylor Swift’s 1989
In this Word Cloud, I used all the lyrics from Taylor Swift’s 1989 album.
I had to do a few things. Some lyrics websites will not repeat a chorus, and just write 2x or 4x instead, so I had to go through and actually copy the chorus that many times.
Most Word Cloud apps exclude “common” words; I had to turn off that feature because I knew that Ms. Swift uses “I” and “you” a lot, and I wanted that to be reflected in the cloud. It also included “the” and “and” which I didn’t initially want, and I could have changed by deleting those in the Word file I made of all the lyrics; however, I like the effect I got with the “You And I” so I left it.
Audience: Taylor Swift fans and those who might be interested in Swift’s lyrics.
Purpose: to show how often Swift uses certain words in her songs
Tool: Wordle
Time: This took me about 45 minutes to collect all the lyrics in one document, correct the x2/x3/x4 parts, and then tweak Wordle to get the version I wanted.

14. Charts, Graphs, and Figures
Chart: a sheet of information in the form of a table, graph, or diagram. Graph: a diagram showing the relation between variable quantities, typically of two variables, each measured along one of a pair of axes at right angles. Figure: a diagram or illustrative drawing

15. Charts, Graphs, and Figures
Chart: a sheet of information in the form of a table, graph, or diagram. Graph: a diagram showing the relation between variable quantities, typically of two variables, each measured along one of a pair of axes at right angles. Figure: a diagram or illustrative drawing

19. Chart of education growth as marker of economic shift
In this line graph, I show changes in “economic class” over time with an added variable line of educational attainment over time.
The “class” categories are debatable. Even if correcting for inflation, poverty and lower classes depend a lot on where a person lives and the amount of time required to work ($25,000 gets a person a lot more in Detroit than in San Francisco). However, the Census Bureau has consistently defined $100,000 or more as upper-middle to upper-class. Only 5% make more than $150,000 and only 1% make more than $250,000.
Audience: magazine/newspaper readers interested in economic and educational changes over time.
Purpose: to show economic and educational attainment changes
Tool: Microsoft Excel
Time: This took me about 2 hours. The Census Bureau has used different methods of collecting income data, so it took an hour to find the right data, compute the percentages in Excel. The educational data is more consistent, but I still had to find the right tables to compute the percentages. Excel is a “dumb” tool, so I had to spend 30 minutes tweaking the chart and reformatting the numbers to get a proper graph.