Weekly Viz 2020-02-10

Nearly a quarter of Americans have never experienced the U.S. in a time of peace

About Makeover Monday

MakeoverMonday is a social data project: “Each week we post a link to a chart, and its data, and then you rework the chart. Maybe you retell the story more effectively, or find a new story in the data. We’re curious to see the different approaches you all take. Whether it’s a simple bar chart or an elaborate infographic, we encourage everyone of all skills to partake. Together we can have broader conversations about and with data.”

Starting from Jan 08, 2018, I decided to put aside one hour on Monday weekly to create some visualization and find some insights from the data.

The datasets are published each week at: MakeoverMonday Datasets.

Makeover Monday 20200210

This week’s data picked a very interesting point – how much time in your life has US been at war. And the answer is pretty surprising to me – Nearly a quarter of Americans actually have never experienced the U.S. in a time of peace. The original post from Washington Post can be found here. I like the viz as it shows how it changes for the people born in different years, but the outer circle and the inner pie do not align to some extent, thus make it harder to understand.

My Visualization

Also to solve the problem I mentioned above, I created a viz similar to heatmap – red means at war while blue not, with the aggregated % at war for people born at each year on the top. One thing to notice is the years in this viz is based on the original viz, but seems like it’s somewhat shorter than what I can find on Google…

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Please notice that all the visualizations are designed for desktop view, so it is recommended to view them on a desktop device.

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Insights

• For the most long-living man in the US now (born at 1905), 35% of his life to date, US has been at war with other countries;
• For people born after 2001, sadly there has not been any time in their life that US is not at war (though they may not really feel it as it’s mostly happening in the Middle East).

Follow this link to find more weekly vizzes :)