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This week, I chose to analyze the death rates from various causes by each state. The data provided us with the death rates from various sources such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, flu, heart, nephritis, respiratory problems, acid, vehicle deaths, and others. When looking at this data, there was so much to see and learn that it took me a little bit to understand what I wanted to visualize. By the end, I decided to only compare the death rates between cancer and heart disease, seeing that those are two of the most commonly known killers in the US.

As Yau says, the way you display your data is extremely important, so therefore choosing the right data visualization is very influential in how people view your data. I tried different methods and different programs, but each one seemed to be confusing if you haven’t played around with it for a little bit. It was also interesting to me to see how confusing the assortment of tools could be in addition to the enormous amount of data, and for a while I was only hurting myself by getting caught up in how to do everything. However, after playing around with some other data visualization tools I decided to use tableau since it is the easiest system for me to understand and use. After inputting the data set, I decided that the best way to compare the two diseases was to use a bar graph. This proved to be helpful since you could clearly see the data from each disease in each state against each other. You can see the visualization here.