As I began to understand using Tableau, I looked into the leading causes of death in New York City. I found myself interested in how mental health related deaths impact different ethnicities and began to explore how to view this data from different visualizations. As my final visualization, I chose to build a dashboard to bring all of my revised visualizations of this data together, to tell a clearer story of how I came to focus on this specific topic. I first began broadly, with the graph depicting the death rate among all the different ethnicities provided throughout the years. I then was able to inquire further into this data, revealing the most evident leading causes of death, viewed similarly through the lens of ethnicity. It is clear at the base of this graph that there is a noticeable difference between how the different ethnicities are impacted by mental health. I decided to break this information down more clearly as a pie chart, to compare specifically the mental health related death rates by ethnicity. To finalize my dashboard, I included a line graph to show how this data has changed throughout the years, proving to be increasing substantially since 2020 and on. In comparison to my original graphs based on this data, my dashboard shows a much clearer narrative to this data, as the viewer can understand this issue from a wider scope to a narrower one throughout this group of visualizations.

My map was inspired by the inquiry of what makes a safe space, or challenges that space, for queer people in the United States. In order to plot this on a map, I gathered the data on homophobia related hate crimes and the locations of the different queer nightlife in the U.S. My original map of this data showed a density of red where the most hate crimes occurred, and white dots for the locations of queer spaces. Acoording to my users, this read as a bit scary, resembling a sort of disease spread over the country. My purpose for this map was not to scare my users but to inspire community through challenging areas, showing queer nightlife as a safe haven for those that might not have alternative places to feel like themselves. I feel that my revisions to this map evoke my narrative a bit more. The black background map allows for the hate to show as a less threatening color, blue, while still revealing the truth of violence targetted against queer people. The location points have been changed to rainbow flags in order to more obviously read as queer spaces while also assisting in bringing more hope into the map, as these points shine through.

My network was inspired by the connections between anemones and the fish that live within them. I set out to explore this relationship by simply creating a network connecting the two, with the sizes of points measuring the amount of edges a specific fish or anemone had. While this created an interesting network visually, I felt it didn’t share much additional information with the viewer and didn’t inquire much about these relationships. Additionally, through the use of Flourish as opposed to Gephi, I was able to add images of the fish and anemones to bring this network more to life, allowing the users of this network, true beginners into this topic, like myself, to better visualize this network of habitats that exist in the ocean. My final network includes the ability to highlight a species and see its links, with the images to provide context.