Democracy & the Republic: Politics and Data
Class: VCD10 - Data Visualization
Co-Creator: Daniela Mantica
We were tasked with choosing a topic related to the American political sphere, sourcing and compiling data into spreadsheets, and creating a narrative that both represented the data and told a story. We wanted to look at the recent media coverage of book bans and parse through various elements, such as the districts in which books are being banned, the reasons for bans, instigators of such bans, and possible relevant political motivations.
We struggled to find data on the locations, sources, and political motivations for the bans given that the bans were often based in school districts, and districts varied immensely both in internal party demographics and in data availability. After finding the American Library Association's lists of the top 10 books banned by year, we decided to shift gears to look at the reasons for books being banned and frequency.
After our data collection and sorting, our narrative became clear: to emphasize the changing content distribution of banned books, namely the recent sharp uptick in the banning of books with LGBTQIA+ content and the decrease of banning books with sexually explicit and violent content. We also wanted to include the names of the books to allow viewers to do their own research into the books and think for themselves whether these books are deserving of their bans. We wanted to make the visualization illustrative with the bookshelf and child details to both draw the viewer in and giving a substantial context and gloom to the subject.
