*⚠️NOTE: CONTENT PROVIDED MAY BE SENSITIVE/TRIGGERING TO SOME VIEWERS.
HEAVY SUBJECTS SUCH AS SCHOOL GUN VIOLENCE IS INCLUDED.⚠️*
For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a dataset that reports cases of school shootings, including what area of a campus they occurred on. The source of this data set is the CHDS School Shooting Safety Compendium.
I wanted to create a visualization that would allow users to visualize how schools are being affected by gun violence. I was curious if there was a trend for specific locations that shooters targeted over the years. This can also provide us information about which locations are the safest versus more dangerous during a shooting. This is also relevant to current times as school shootings are quickly becoming more common (even in our area).
In my visualization, the data is represented as dots located on different areas of the campus, based off of the X and Y coordinates of the campus. The color indicates how many school shootings have occurred there, based off of a tier system. There are five tiers: the darker red the color is, the higher the tier is, or in other words, the more shootings occurred. A key is provided in the top right corner to show the range of amount of shootings for each tier and shade of red.
To interact with the visualization, try hovering over each dot. This will provide you more specific information, compared to the tier/color system, including the source and exact amount of shootings. This information will pop-up on the bottom of your screen.
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that most of the school shootings, by far (467!), is in parking lots. The closest area that comes to it is classrooms with 203 shootings, which itself is a large outlier.
Something I still wonder about is what aspects of the policing system caused 24 cases to have null data. This itself could be another CS project, by visualizing the accuracy and detail of police reports correlated with income levels, overall economy, and crime rates in the specific associated area.