eli w
eli w
For my final data visualization project, I chose to work with a data set about extinct languages around the world. It provides the number of speakers, the UNESCO language classification system, and the coordinates of the language.
I decided to work with this dataset because I enjoy learning languages. I'm currently fluent-ish in two languages and learning three more. While the languages that I'm learning are commonly spoken, I find it really interesting that languages die and wanted to investigate patterns.
In my visualization, the data is represented as dots lain over a map. The dots represent the languages and are placed over the location that the language is spoken at. The size of the circles depend on the number of speakers, with bigger circles representing larger speaker population, and smaller circles representing smaller speaker populations. There are two colours of circle, red and orange. The orange circles represent severely endangered languages (by the UNESCO classification system), and the red ones represent critically endangered languages.
To interact with the visualization, try hovering over some of the dots. Text will appear beside the dot with the number of speakers and the name of the language. You can also zoom into parts of the map as some dots are extremely small, representing languages with only one or two speakers. At the top of the screen, there is also a dropdown menu where one can filter the dots to show only the severely endangered dots, or only the critically endangered dots, or both.
One interesting thing I noticed during this project is that many of the languages with only one or two speakers left are on islands. I also noticed that the UNESCO classification system had a wide range in number of speakers. For example, languages with 500,000 speakers are classified as "severely endangered," and a language with 12 speakers is classified as the same.
Something I still wonder about is how my map would change if I had more updated data. The dataset that I used for this project was a little outdated, so I'm sure that some of the languages with very little speakers may have died out. The other thing was that some of the languages listed in the dataset came up as dialects of broader, more widely spoken languages when I searched them up. Although it would be very inefficient and take a very long time to go through all of the languages and search them up, I'm wondering how my map would change if I excluded these dialects.
The most challenging moment of this project was adding the dropdown menu into my code. I started by adding features where I could click to cycle through showing all or only one category of the data but eventually wanted to add a dropdown menu. I had to reorder other parts of my code in order to add the dropdown correctly and even had to change some things in the index.html part of my code.
If I had more time, I would like to add some more categories to my dropdown menu, such as filtering by number of speakers instead of the UNESCO classification system. I would also like to add some kind of description on the side or top describing how to interpret the visualisation.
My proudest moment during this project was when I got my dropdown menu to work in the last five minutes of class (and a couple minutes more) with help. I felt like I actually knew what I was doing at that point and it felt really good for my dropdown menu to work after a frenzied few minutes of work.