Chana Kraus-Friedberg

Jessica Dixon and Miranda Kalbach:

I thought this was a great series of visualizations-one of the best things about it is that it breaks up and sorts the data in different ways, so that it engenders new questions about it. It says in the CUT-DDV that the users would be students and teachers, and I can see a lot of students coming away from these interactives wanting to dig deeper into the history of how Holocaust books have gotten published and read.

To me, the most engaging interactives were the ones where they placed a series of small multiples next to a bar chart (as they did in the visualizations of Fiction vs Non-Fiction, for example)-it's an engaging way to break things down by decade and illustrate a trend over time in the same space. I also thought consolidating the original publication timeline into one that broke publications down by decade was a good choice-it made it easier to conceptualize the flow of the publication history. I almost wished that the publication maps had been consolidated, too, so that the US publications and non-US publications would be on the same map--as it stands, each map seemed a bit empty by itself. Overall, though, I think these infographics are engaging and easy to understand, and could spark a lot of creative thinking about the data.

Zhongshan Zhu:

I think this is a really interesting series of visualizations-it's not an aspect of the data on soldier mortality that I've ever thought of, and the idea that lower estimates of soldier deaths might be used as a perceptual anchor point for the public is pretty intriguing. I also liked the idea of comparing Afghanistan and Iraq to each other, and including American territories, which are often left out of any visualization of the US.

I liked the idea of using red and blue as colors throughout-it seemed kind of thematic-but it might have made it easier for users to visually identify the subjects of individual maps/graphs if they had been associated with a particular kind of map--for example, maybe using one color for maps of Afghanistan casualties and one for Iraq casualties, or one for estimates as a percentage of actual mortalities and one for raw mortality numbers, etc. it also might have been good to use less saturated colors-the fact that deep red often denotes danger makes the red images seem more dangerous than the blue ones (even though actually all the numbers are pretty dire!) I also wished there had been some text somewhere to explain who estimates casualties and how they do it-it was striking that some states had higher or lower levels of estimates as a percentage of the actual mortalities than others, and it would have been interesting to be able to come to some kind f conclusion as a user about why that is. Overall, though, these visualization did a good job of getting me to think in a new way about a set of data, and I think it would probably prompt other users to do the same.

I have neither given nor received aid while working on this assignment. I have completed the graded portion BEFORE looking at anyone else's work on this assignment. Chana Kraus-Friedberg