travel – Online Reporting, Research & Writing

Data Sketches, a fun and creative blog for data visuals

data

Throughout this course, we have been using data, as well as looking at data visuals. I wanted to see what other ways people can present data, other than what we seen in class. I came across this blog called Data Sketches, by two people named Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu from two different countries where they decided to collaborate with each other for twelve months.

Each month there’s a topic and they must come up with a visual representation by the end of the month. They are free to do whatever they want, if it fits the topic. They also documented the process of each week. Which includes the data research, sketching the visuals, up until the final product.

travel

What I like about their blog is their creativity with their visual data representation. While looking at each topic for that month, my favorite month was September where the topic was about Travel. They both took the topic and made it personal to them. Nadieh’s visual focused on all the vacations that she went on ever since she was younger.

Check here to see Nadieh’s finished data visual. Shirley’s data visual only represented four years of vacations that she went on. Check out Shirley’s finished data visual here.

Story Map about where I traveled in 2017

2017

I was inspired by the blog Data Sketches, from their data visual topic on travel. If they could create visuals of their past travel vacations from years ago, then I could too. I don’t have the skill sets to create such pretty data visuals, so I found a program that I can easily use to represent my travel vacation from 2017. From the same creators of Timeline JS, they made Story Map JS.

Story Map JS helps create stories with videos and images through a map.

The first step that I did was look at all the pictures from my Google Photos, social media, and from my parents and sibling’s social media as well. I organized the pictures to where I traveled in 2017.

Check out my Story Map here.

Feel like you’ve traveled everywhere just by reading this article

Yes, it is 2018, we have not time traveled but we are traveling instead through different landscapes and climates with the help of The New York Times’ article, “52 Places to Go in 2017.”

Though this article is past due on an update, it still deserves admiration for its layout and quality of visuals.

Moving through this article, readers can get a taste of different countries like India or Canada while getting some information on the place of interest.

For each location, there is a large picture or video that takes up the entire page with a description on what to expect there. Under the text is a map of the destination with links to social media so that readers can discuss with the rest of the web about opinions.