For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a dataset that covered the statuses of cities across the silk road every 50 years, starting from 1100 going to 1800.
I wanted to create a visualization that would allow users to explore the data and how the cities changed over time.
In my visualization, the data is represented as points on the map, centered on Eurasia, where the Silk Road was is. The size represents the population of the city, while the color represents whether or not it is a capital.
To interact with the visualization, try pressing the enter and delete keys to go forward and back in time. Hovering over the points allows you to see the name of the city. Some points overlap at the zoomed out view, so you may need to zoom in to differentiate the names.
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that certain cities spiked and dipped in population without much of a pattern or reason.
Something I still wonder about is what factors go into population and if any of the variables the creators of the dataset measured correlates with it rising or falling.