Hasnain Nazar, Anne Gruel, Andrew Lambert, Puneet Sharma
1. What’s our story?
Our background for the infographic is that we are a university professor in the department of Ethnic Studies. Our goal for the infographic is to get students interested in our class and to register for it to learn more about sociological and institutional phenomenons. The infographic aims to depict the disparity of stop and frisk occurrences between the Hispanic, Black and other populations of LA. The overall finding and statistics shown on the infographic show that blacks are stopped and frisked much more than any other racial population.
2. How does the selected data support your story?
The data showing how often blacks are stopped in comparison to other races truly highlights the issue of race and perception in society. The data we selected to use to tell our story was:
Population of LA County by race
Number of stop and frisks by race
Percentage of arrests by race
Our aim of also discussing sociological biases may also be relevant as we can lead our class through a discussion on racial bias, self-fulfilling prophecies and institutional racism. A discourse around race and America may also be relevant but as one can see we have enough to discuss for one class session!
3. What data did you omit, and why?
We wanted to perform a more granular analysis of this issue by drilling down into the city-level to the neighborhood-level data. For example, some neighborhoods may have more blacks than other neighborhoods. Would there be more overall arrests in these neighborhoods? The data set provides neighborhood labels, however we also need the longitude/latitude mapping to explore this spatially. This longitude/latitude data is unavailable to us as part of the data set, so we decided it was out of scope for this exercise.
We also pivoted from our original concept, which used a set of squares to show the disparity between race population and their relative stop & frisk rates. As we looked deeper into the data, we realized we had compared proportions of the absolute population (which sum up to 100%) with the stop & frisk numbers relative to racial categories, which do not add up to 100%. Therefore, we took a step back.
4. How does the representation support your story?
We used numbers like “4x” and “10x” to emphasize the contrast between stop & frisk rates between racial groups. We also used bar graphs to facilitate quick comparisons between the 3 groups. Bar charts allow the viewer to compare quantitative data in a single dimension, which is easier to process than our earlier square visualization, which forced comparisons in two dimensions.
5. What visual metaphor(s) did you use, and why?
Our visual metaphor centered around the humiliating and impersonal nature of stop & frisk. The central illustration shows someone’s personal space being violated in a stop & frisk. We used this metaphor to expose the seriousness of this issue to students, who come from a variety of racial backgrounds.
One conversation we had was how to represent the individual races visually. Should we use icons to depict the races? As an ethnic studies professor, we realized this could compromise the agency of these groups. Marginalized communities already have issues speaking for themselves because they don’t have access to certain channels. We wanted to avoid speaking for populations that we are not a part of. We didn’t want groups to be identified with specific colors, so we stuck to grayscale We also decided to use abstract representations of the data through bar charts and such.