Anne Harding
For the midterm project, I will be visualizing data from the Chronology of Data Breaches dataset published by the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. The dataset contains information on data breaches from 2005 to the present, including dates, locations, and type and scope of the incidents. While there are already a number of good visualizations available for some of the very biggest data breaches in recent years, I am specifically interested in examining overall trends, including:
- rates of breach type over time
- relative severity of breaches by type over time
- data breaches by industry
My goal is to make this information accessible to a general audience. While this kind of data is frequently used by analysts working in information security and risk assessment, data breaches often directly impact the general public when private information like social security or credit card numbers are exposed; it is important for information regarding the nature and frequency of data breaches to be appropriately communicated to the people they have the potential to affect.
The project itself will include at least three interactive visualizations that I will host on my website. My current plan is to use either Tableau Public or Plotly, although as I begin to work with the data, I may select another tool if it is found to be more appropriate.
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Update: After consulting with Dr. H, I switched projects. See below:
In Fall 2014, I became interested in the history of country music in the US while working on a collection of photographs from the Southern Folklife Collection as part of my TRAship with Photographic Archives in Wilson Library. As country music has a lyrical tradition that heavily emphasizes location (e.g. one would expect it to be more likely for a country song to reference Georgia vs. Connecticut), I thought that it would be interesting to visualize which states within the United States were most frequently mentioned within song lyrics, and to visualize how these locations may (or may not) have changed over time.
At that time, I assembled a basic list of the #1 hit country songs from 1944-1979. Although I didn’t have the background knowledge to realize the project at that time, I thought that it would be appropriate for the midterm project.
Refining my original idea to be appropriate for the INLS 541 midterm, I developed the following goals:
From the original list of songs, develop a dataset with lyrics for each individual song from which I can identify place name references.
Create at least two interactive visualizations using either CartoDB or Tableau depicting states mentioned in these lyrics, with an emphasis on changes over time.
Create a basic one-page website to present these visualizations to a general audience - it can be easy to think of visualizations as a final product (and in many cases, it may indeed be the end of your involvement in a project), but I think it's worthwhile to consider how the visualizations will be contextualized and presented to an audience.
Website (The Geography of Country Music)
Lance Stokes Review:
This was my favorite project of all the midterm presentation. As a fan of classic country, this was right in my wheelhouse, so I can be considered a target user for this visualization. First, it's obvious that you put a great deal of thought and effort into this project. The extent of your efforts to make the data conform is impressive, and I'll save your report a resource for the future. It's a wonderful, step-by-step walk thru of your entire process. I also really like the color choices you made. I think of country as an earthy subsection of the music spectrum, and the deep reds were appropriate. The interactivity is really very useful, and I enjoyed being able to use both the slider as well as the decade selection option. The website is very nice, and provides a nice enhancement for the visualization.
Perhaps the only addition I'd like to see on this visualization is the plotting of the actual towns that were mentioned in the songs, possibly linked via tooltip to the song or songs which mentioned that town. It would be fun to see if there are some songs that are mentioned more often as well as any clustering of these towns that might prompt correlation with the songwriters' home or somesuch. Plus, the locations of places like "Jackson" and "Reno" would be interesting to link with the songs that made them famous!
Overall, really a great, through job that serves as an example to the others in class!