AMY E MARTIN // Blog

For my interactive studio, we're working on data visualizations. As we're only going over it for a couple of weeks, we're doing really basic stuff. I've decided to look at movie data and so far I've got a couple of draft visualizations.

This first one is a simple plot of the top 20 most popular movies (according to IMDB) from various genres over time. Though the colors are too dark, the graph shows basic trends like the popularity of Westerns in the 60s or how more recent animation is much more popular than, say, Fantasia.

I also took the roles of Oscar winning actresses and actors and grouped them into categories so we could see media-based gender roles. This is a much looser interpretation of the data (my categories are obviously somewhat arbitrary based on what I saw as trends) but it's an interesting study nonetheless. As these sketches are done in Processing they take a bit of time for me and my non-programmer brain so I've only fully completed the actresses sketch but here's a screenshot.

This assignment is quite a bit of fun and while the math and programming for most of the beautiful visualizations at places like Visual Complexity is beyond me at the moment, I hope to do some hand drawings, some more intricate illustrations in Illustrator and perhaps a physical data representation of some sort.

Labels: data visualization, interactive, school work