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Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer

Hey everyone, I'm super stoked to see this project getting some more traction! I was responsible for the visualizations / the scraping, so I'm happy to answer any questions people might have about the whole process. ^_^

mars4rp 9y ago
The coloring of the chart is awful, alzheimer and terrorism having almost identical color.
- soSadSoSorry 9y ago
  Oh you!
- troels 9y ago
  I have to concur. I was confused for a moment about the staggering number of deaths caused by terrorism, until I realised what was going on.
- owenshen24 9y ago
  That's an easily remediable fix!
darkerside 9y ago
I think the concept here is fascinating. One thing I didn't see addressed was that it's not totally unexpected for rare causes of death to be overrepresented in the news (apocryphally, it's been said that "dog bites man" is not news--"man bites dog" is). That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).
owenversteeg 9y ago
Hello, Owen, from another Owen! I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it! One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all? Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?
- owenshen24 9y ago
  Hm. The thing about costs is interesting. (That spending so much on terrorism is why we see so few deaths.) Evaluating counterfactuals is always hard. If I were to tackle it, I'd probably look at what we're spending the terrorism budget on, what the upper bound of deaths might be, and if it'd be reasonable to think that whatever counterterrorism measures we're taking could actually save that many lives. I think there are more nuanced views that are worth expressing, as some commenters have already pointed out, for example, looking at years of life lost (i.e. controlling for age of death). While I think the data we got was in broad strokes representative, I'd be curious to see what it looks like in other countries, as I'm wondering if cultural bias plays a large role. I'm not too sure if I'll write many more blog posts exploring this dataset in the future; the data is all there on GitHub, though, if anyone else wants to play with it. :)
verelo 9y ago
I love the graphs, but the way they’re used in this article is very annoying on an iPhone. That scroller is hard to grab and when i zoom i cannot are all the data anymore. No better in landscape mode. Not sure if you can influence that, but thought I’d give the feedback since you mentioned the visualizations.
- owenshen24 9y ago
  Ah, I see. The charting library I used (charts.js) didn't come with an easy way to have a time axis, so I rigged up some stuff with JQuery and a slider. I guess something that could have helped with accessibility would have been a dropdown box instead to select the years.
thyrsus 9y ago
Did the database of articles include the obituaries?
mdpopescu 9y ago
Great job! One observation though: I would have liked the last graph to have three parts: under-reported causes on the left, "pretty ok" in the middle, and over-reported on the right. They are mixed up right now, which makes them harder to differentiate.
- owenshen24 9y ago
  Oh, yeah, that seems like a good way to help with clarity. Thanks for sharing. I'll see if I can make some minor edits this week to help with that.
dpkonofa 9y ago
This is great! Can you give any insight into your charts? I have similar data sets that I would love to represent like this. It sounds like you already mentioned using chart.js. Anything else that you use, specifically for the first few charts with the time slider? Anything crazy that you needed to do?
- owenshen24 9y ago
  To start with, I didn't know much about charting on the web before this project. (It's much harder than in Python :P) I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-46e7f4dc34e6 https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-... If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist](https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/ https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the easiest to get up and running. While charts.js is a little more interactive, it was a little painful to get up and running. The time slider is just an input slider some jQuery I wrote that dynamically loads up a new dataset and calls the redraw function in charts.js to load up a new chart. Overall, as someone with entry-level experience in both manipulating data and web development, I found the overall process to be a little rough at first, but it got a lot better once I got the hang of the library. In total, the entire website took me about a week, with 2 hours of work every day. So something like 15 hours, total?
  - dpkonofa 9y ago
    Wow... nice work. It's not my first foray into data visualization but it will be my first serious attempt at working it from the ground up. Thanks for the info!

mars4rp 9y ago

The coloring of the chart is awful, alzheimer and terrorism having almost identical color.

soSadSoSorry 9y ago
Oh you!
troels 9y ago
I have to concur. I was confused for a moment about the staggering number of deaths caused by terrorism, until I realised what was going on.
owenshen24 9y ago
That's an easily remediable fix!

darkerside 9y ago

I think the concept here is fascinating. One thing I didn't see addressed was that it's not totally unexpected for rare causes of death to be overrepresented in the news (apocryphally, it's been said that "dog bites man" is not news--"man bites dog" is). That said, it seems like the modern short news cycle has edged out attention being paid to long term trends (kidney disease mortality prevalence was surprising to me as well).

owenversteeg 9y ago

Hello, Owen, from another Owen! I actually find this pretty funny as overrepresentation of certain causes of death is something I've been talking about to friends and family for years, and I was actually recently thinking to compile some data on it. Hilarious that another Owen beat me to it! One thing I've been meaning to write about for a while is terrorism specifically. I was thinking of writing something refuting the idea of "so few people die of terrorism because we spend so much, if we spent less it'd be a massive problem." Is that something you've thought of at all? Have you thought of using this data for anything else? Maybe writing some blog posts about the data or looking at a wider range of publications and comparing them for which are more "accurate" in their articles on death?

owenshen24 9y ago
Hm. The thing about costs is interesting. (That spending so much on terrorism is why we see so few deaths.) Evaluating counterfactuals is always hard. If I were to tackle it, I'd probably look at what we're spending the terrorism budget on, what the upper bound of deaths might be, and if it'd be reasonable to think that whatever counterterrorism measures we're taking could actually save that many lives. I think there are more nuanced views that are worth expressing, as some commenters have already pointed out, for example, looking at years of life lost (i.e. controlling for age of death). While I think the data we got was in broad strokes representative, I'd be curious to see what it looks like in other countries, as I'm wondering if cultural bias plays a large role. I'm not too sure if I'll write many more blog posts exploring this dataset in the future; the data is all there on GitHub, though, if anyone else wants to play with it. :)

verelo 9y ago

I love the graphs, but the way they’re used in this article is very annoying on an iPhone. That scroller is hard to grab and when i zoom i cannot are all the data anymore. No better in landscape mode. Not sure if you can influence that, but thought I’d give the feedback since you mentioned the visualizations.

owenshen24 9y ago
Ah, I see. The charting library I used (charts.js) didn't come with an easy way to have a time axis, so I rigged up some stuff with JQuery and a slider. I guess something that could have helped with accessibility would have been a dropdown box instead to select the years.

thyrsus 9y ago

Did the database of articles include the obituaries?

mdpopescu 9y ago

Great job! One observation though: I would have liked the last graph to have three parts: under-reported causes on the left, "pretty ok" in the middle, and over-reported on the right. They are mixed up right now, which makes them harder to differentiate.

owenshen24 9y ago
Oh, yeah, that seems like a good way to help with clarity. Thanks for sharing. I'll see if I can make some minor edits this week to help with that.

dpkonofa 9y ago

This is great! Can you give any insight into your charts? I have similar data sets that I would love to represent like this. It sounds like you already mentioned using chart.js. Anything else that you use, specifically for the first few charts with the time slider? Anything crazy that you needed to do?

owenshen24 9y ago
To start with, I didn't know much about charting on the web before this project. (It's much harder than in Python :P) I briefly looked at all the charting libraries on this list here: https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-46e7f4dc34e6 https://hackernoon.com/9-best-javascript-charting-libraries-... If I were doing this project over again, I'd probably use [Chartist](https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/ https://gionkunz.github.io/chartist-js/) as out of all the libraries I looked at, it seems to be the easiest to get up and running. While charts.js is a little more interactive, it was a little painful to get up and running. The time slider is just an input slider some jQuery I wrote that dynamically loads up a new dataset and calls the redraw function in charts.js to load up a new chart. Overall, as someone with entry-level experience in both manipulating data and web development, I found the overall process to be a little rough at first, but it got a lot better once I got the hang of the library. In total, the entire website took me about a week, with 2 hours of work every day. So something like 15 hours, total?
- dpkonofa 9y ago
  Wow... nice work. It's not my first foray into data visualization but it will be my first serious attempt at working it from the ground up. Thanks for the info!