This is a straightforward visualization. It showcases the United States and provides interactivity to allow users to compare the individual unemployment rates per state to the annual national unemployment rate. Interactivity includes: hovering, a tooltip, and scanning through two decades worth of unemployment data. Hovering & the tooltip are cohesive, and they provide the user with high-level statistics about the state. In terms of percentages, all percentages in this visualization are calculated through magnitude of thousands. The unemployment data was repetitive to aggregate, but sliding provides the user with ease for seeing changes over time. A few interesting trends include the consistency of the Central U.S. When panning through years, you can see the Western and Eastern Coast of the U.S. have sharper trends in unemployment, but the Midwest maintains consistent. Even regarding heavily populated states, the ones in Central U.S. remain relatively consistent whereas heavily populated states such as California and New York fluctuate often. In addition, you can view the country's recovery since the recession hit in 2008-2009.
What is the motivation behind this visualization? As a student, it is easy to be egocentric with my concerns of graduating and finding a job. Through my own perspective, it is already difficult enough to find a job, but this caused me to begin thinking about those unlike me. Meaning those who are not full-time students searching for a job, but rather, individuals who are looking for work without the protection of school. Thus I was attracted to learning more about unemployment. It is very easy to get wrapped up in one's own world and forget about problems that others are experiencing, and even though unemployment rates have been improving, I want to shed light on the significant issue that unemployment truly is; especially for minorities.
There are multiple resources used for this visualization: For help with interacting with topographical files, I consulted this visualization by Sam Matthews. For help creating a slider to change data, I consulted this visualization by Martin Chorley. For a general skeleton for the visualization, I consulted this visualization by Mike Bostock.