SPP Student Exhibits Data Stories
The Data Stories exhibition ran from November 18 to 29 at CEU. SPP MPA student Zintis Hermansons was one of the exhibitors, with four pieces on display. The purpose of the exhibition was to highlight the interesting and novel ways of understanding the complexities of CEU's various disciplines through different forms of data visualization.
Here, Zintis tells us about the exhibition and the work which he had on display...
Can you tell us about the exhibition and how you came to be involved in it?
The aim of the 'Data Stories' exhibition was to engage the whole CEU community to share beautiful and useful displays of data relevant to the social sciences. The purpose was to highlight interesting and novel ways of how to understand the various disciplines we study in CEU through visualizations. The event was the first of its kind for CEU and there are plans to organize it again next year. As this event was an open call for visualizations, I decided to participate to share some of the ideas which I developed while studying the International Development course at SPP.
What information do your data stories tell?
My data stories don't have any particular message or bottom line. Instead, they draw attention to two big topics of international development which we covered during our class, namely wealth measured in GDP and mortality - focused particularly on infant mortality. As it can be seen from the visualizations, there is great inequality between rich and poor countries among different regions in the world.
What is the main purpose of this type of data visualization?
As I wanted to show interesting ways to describe the data, I chose to avoid using the traditional column or line graphs. Instead, my purpose was to show that data visualization can be depicted in a more advanced manner, while remaining easily comprehensible. My visualizations include four ways of visualizing data: boxplot graph, group histogram, 2d histogram, and 3d scatterplot.
The boxplot graph is useful for illustrating the spread of the data set using quartiles and thus showing how unequal the GDP distribution is in particular regions of the world. Whereas the purpose of the 2d histogram is to combine elements of histogram and scatterplot graphs showing frequency of mortality at particular rates in the world.
Can you give us a little information on your background in data visualization?
I don't have any particular academic training in data visualization, I have learned it by myself while working as a senior expert in the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Regional Development of Latvia dealing with regional development analysis. During my work there I had the opportunity to learn from my colleagues and become acquainted with various data visualization tools as well. I am particularly interested in the application of the statistical programming software R, which I have used to create these data visualizations.
Will you be using data visualization in your studies at SPP?
During my studies at SPP I am definitely planning to use data visualizations as graphs or maps are an easy way to communicate results of any kind of analysis. I hope that it will particularly help me to work with my client during the course of the Passion Project.
You can check out the data visualizations which Zintis created below.
