For my final data visualization, I chose to work with Silk Road Cities Across the Years from Harvard. I chose to work with this because it correlated to work I was doing in the Humanities.

I chose this data set because it stood out to me amongst the others, and I though that it would be a fun way to correlate what I am learning in Humanities to my CS project.

In my visualization, the data is represented as dots, correlating to the latitude and longitude of the Silk Road city. The size of the dots represents the population.

To interact with the visualization, try hovering over the dot, and it will tell you the population, the current year, and the name of that city. To advance the year, try dragging the slider. As you change the years, you will see that the population changes drastically, and the color changes as well. If the dot turns yellow, then that means that it was under the rule of the Mongol Empire at the time. You can see the Mongol Empire grow and shrink throughout the years.

One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that the population can drastically change for the cities over the years. I also think that it is cool to see how the Mongol Empire grew over the years, eventually becoming the largest continuous empire in history.  

Something I still wonder about is how some countries' populations grew significantly while others stayed the same, even though they were in relatively close proximity.

The most challenging moment of this project was creating the slider because I had to edit my code significantly to make it work properly.

If I had more time, I would like to change the map starter code to a more detailed map that is slightly more zoomed in, so I could see the cities more clearly

My proudest moment during this project was when I had a question for the teacher on how to change the size of the circles, but when they told me to try to solve it on my own, I worked on it and eventually did it correctly without help.