The Epidemic of Unemployment

Alpha Release Prototype:

Visualization Description:

My goal for this visualization is to show the change in unemployment over a 20 year span. Beginning with 1999 and continuing on to 2019, I want to educate the viewers in terms of how employment has changed over time. In addition to this goal, I want to analyze the relationships between race and unemployment. This visualization will help support that goal by providing the opportunity to visualize unemployment while highlighting areas in the U.S. that have higher concentrations of Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc.

Planned Interactivity:

There are two primary features of interactivity that I am aiming to integrate:
First, a hover feature. When hovering over a state, a tooltip will appear and display statistics including: the rate of unemployment, the state's rank nationally in terms of unemployment, percentage of white residents, percentage of black residents, etc. Overall providing a better understanding of the specific state.

Secondly, a transition feature. What I mean by this is a feature that allows the user to choose a year in which they wish to view the country and its unemployment rates. Simply with the click of a button they could navigate from seeing the U.S. in 2007 to 2011. Thus highlighting the way the nation has changed over time.

Prototype Design:

I used Tableau for my prototype. The data used here allowed Tableau to automatically generate latitude and longitude values. Longitude is used for the column values and latitude is used for the row values. This then allows for great ease when making a filled map such as this where the colors represent the varying unemployment rates throughout.

Prototype Feedback:

Much of the feedback that I got from the peer-review portion of this project came from the map itself. It is very clear that Alaska is blown out of proportion and there is a lot of useless ink with the inclusion of all of North America.

Verbal feedback included: remodeling the map, differing the colors a bit more, and providing additional interactivity. I initially was going to use a conic projection of the U.S., but it again caused too much distortion with Alaska's size while also stretching the U.S. itself. This led me to find a topological JSON file to use for the country instead.

I made the colors a bit more extreme, so they are easier to distinguish from one another. As well as added a more thorough legend to make it easier to interpret.

Lastly, regarding interaction, this is just a static image so it wasn't hard to improve upon interaction, but ideas from peers such as sliders, tooltips, highlighting, etc. really helped get the ball rolling on this project.