Information Visualization – Gun Deaths

A particular computation information visualization project that I found and admire is Periscopic’s “U.S. Gun Deaths” visualization. This project was overseen by Kim Rees, who is a co-founder of Periscopic. This project was created in 2013, and has been continually updated through 2018 data about gun deaths. This project uses data from U.S. Law Enforcement that voluntarily reported gun homicide deaths. The data does not include suicide deaths by guns.
What I admire most about this project is the simplicity of it. It isn’t a hard graph of data to look at visually, nor is it hard to grasp what it is showing. The data is shown prominently with the total people killed on one side counting up, and the years that were stolen on the other side. I liked showing the years stolen as it is a very large number and really highlights the impact guns have on people in the US, specifically male black Americans. The graph also shows what age each person was killed at, and the predicted age they could have lived to. The last figure is interesting as it highlights how many years they could have had to live. They calculated that data based on the morality rate data from the WHO. I am not sure what algorithms they used to generate the work, but I think it was mostly just loops for each set of data they had, and then a counter for each value they wanted to keep track of.
The creator’s artistic sensibilities of illustrating what potential was lost due to gun deaths, is very prominent and apparent in the final form. The colors highlight the flames of life that were extinguished by guns, and how far they could have gone with the arcs of life. It is a very easy graph to view as well and to understand, making it easily digestible to the regular audience.