US Gun Killings in 2010

GunKillings

Linkhttp://guns.periscopic.com/

This is one of the most unique visualizations that I have ever come across and quite effectively communicates the information about gun killings in the US in 2010. The data about these killings comes from the FBI.

The intent of this visualization is to show the number of deaths caused by gun shootings in every month of the year 2010.  The larger the diameter of the curve, the higher the age of the person when they were shot.  This is not a static visualization wherein you can see the number of deaths per month in the year 2010. There are several features in this visualization with different user intents:

1. As the visualization loads, the cumulative sum of  the number of deaths keeps on increasing as the months go by.

2. Also, it is interesting to see that initially when the first couple of curves are being plotted, a symbolic bullet/gun pellet drops to the X- axis when the person reaches the age when he/she is killed.

3. Clicking on the “age” box in the bottom left corner gives you a static graph in a different format (User Intent: Encode or show a different representation)

4.  If you hover over any of the areas in the visualizations (of both kinds), it describes when, how and at what age that person was shot. (User Intent: Abstract/Elaborate)

5.  However, the most interesting part of this visualization for me is the sum of the number of stolen years from all these people killed. they assume a different life expectancy of every individual (obtained from some data).

Technologies used: Examining the source, they seemed to have used AJAX and Javascript for rendering the visualization.

4 Replies to “US Gun Killings in 2010”

  1. I like this visualization especially the bullet drop when a person was be killed, just like a shooting star falling from the sky and symbolising the death, but it’s kind of sad to see it though.
    Would really like to know what’s the basis of predicting one’s expected life if they weren’t killed.

    1. I was wondering the same thing: the question of how they have predicted the life expectancy of each individual.

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