Blog Post Week 4

For this week’s blog post I decided to make an alluvial graph using my group’s data set. Our dataset looks at the characters of DC and Marvel comics and various attributes associated with them. I made the graph solely using DC’s data set. This alluvial graph was made using RAW.

One of the interesting attributes listed int he DC data is the alignment of the characters (whether they are good, bad, neutral, or what they label to be “reformed”.) Several of the other columns in our data set list physical attributes of the characters. In our society today, there is a big emphasis placed on physical looks and characteristics. There are most definitely certain stereotypes and appearances that are associated with specific moral characteristics. I thought it would be interesting to look at what hair color is associated most with each moral category. We could then draw inferences on what society thinks a “bad” or “good” person looks like.

This data visualization helps the reader visualize the strength of the associations between the different hair colors and character alignment. It is interesting to see that the there are roughly the same amount of good characters with black hair as bad characters with black hair. This is surprising because dark hair many times has a notion of being associated with evil . There are of course many flaws with this. The first being that while the raw number of good and bad characters with black hair might be the same, we cannot draw any inferences about the proportions. There might be a disproportionately higher number of one type of character and this would influence the proportions. Another important thing to consider is what constitutes a good and bad character. Before understanding the true nature of these data types it would be foolish to draw conclusions based off of this graph.

This graph also illuminates several other connections between hair color and character alignment. For example there seem to be more good characters with blonde hair than bad characters. What is also interesting is that there seem to be more good characters with red hair than bad characters as well. Another interesting revelation by this graph is the diversity of hair color types. By just looking at the data one may not realize that there are characters with strawberry blond hair, reddish brown hair, gold, and pink hair. This graph makes it easy to spot the variety. Overall illustrations like this are really useful in seeing interesting trends, but one must be careful to understand the data types behind them.