Who are Yankee Whalemen?
This project trace the development of the labor force of the American whaling industry over the nineteenth century. Using the New Bedford whaling crew list database as a data set and the use of network analysis and mapping this project reveals the racial and geographic makeup of the whaling crews. This project will be structured as an interactive dashboard with multiple visualizations that change based on the input of the reader. The data will be filtered by year which will be able to be changed by a drop-down menu at the top of the dashboard.
The largest and most prominent visualization will be a global map that will be centered on New Bedford Ma. There will be two different map displays that will be toggleable. The first will be a dotted map with points of specific town locations form which New Bedford whalers came from. Each dot will be sized based on the number of whalers recorded. The second map will be a heat map of State/Country with various shading to illustrate the number of whalemen from each area.
The second visualization will be a bimodal network diagram of ships and places of residency for the given year. The network will be filtered as to only include places that appear over 10-20 times in a single year as to avoid an over crowded network. This will show the ships that sailed form New Bedford that year along with large nodes of prominent residencies.
The third visualization will be a bar chart of the specific residencies with the number of whalemen from each location.
The last visualization will be a collection of pie charts organized into specific categories. This visualization will change based on the selection of a point on the map. When a point (or state/country) is highlighted the charts will display location specific data on the collective race, rank, age, and occupation of whalemen from that specific location.
At the top of the Dashboard historical context will be given to the viewer explaining the visualizations below. The role of New Bedford in the American whaling industry will be briefly covered and an explanation of where the data comes from will be shared. The bottom of the Dashboard will present analysis and argument based on the user’s interactions with the dashboard.
One Comment
Maeve Kane
Is the town map going to be global, US, or eastern seaboard? Unless it’s focused on Eastern seaboard, you’d be better served doing the town map as a heatmap, since if you zoom out further it’s going to be difficult for the viewer to tell the difference between the towns.
I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this already, but for the state/country map you’re going to want a dual axis map. Ask me if the tableau docs aren’t clear how to do this.
If you want a network for each year, you’ll need to export an individual image file out of Gephi for each year, and then we’ll host them on the course site for tableau to access. You’ll need to include a new spreadsheet with each year and url of network image listed. Sounds complicated, but pretty straightforward.
I caution against pie charts–theyre very hard to read several of an compare. You’d be better served with a treemap or bar chart for this.