Spiral-Data-Visualizer

NW 2022 Hackathon Project by Angelique Clara Hanzell, Aryan Sonik, Damien Fung, Ramit Brata Biswas

Description

This project visualizes the latest Canadian Covid data in an animated spiral form. It is heavily inspired by this reddit post by u/fabiofavusmaximus, this codebase for generating the static graph, and this recent article by the New York Times.

In this day and age, data visualization is crucial for the consumption of information. Many individuals have grown tired of the endlessly fluctuating COVID-19 statistics in the past 2 years of the pandemic.

In order to revitalize public interest, and concern of the growing number of cases, one method our team has devised would be to switch-up standard visualization techniques. Although controversial for the lack of precision, we believe the uniqueness and beauty of a spiral graph will encourage more people to personally dive deeper into COVID-19 numbers.

Potential Developments

As our representation of the spiral graph did not fully capture the essence and animation style of the original reddit post by u/fabiofavusmaximus, we wish to complete an additional package to the R library: gganimate. A working animation prototype was developed by our team members Aryan Sonik and Damien Fung in this project, but we decided to not use this due to memory limitations of Java preventing the full rendering of gifs.

When completed, this animation package will allow us to dynamically create smoother animations truer to that of the original reddit post.