In this week’s blog, I am sharing with you all the information of slavery in the united states in the decade of 1810-1820. I have had the opportunity to work with well-recorded data, categorized for easier recognition. My research question: Which state had a greater proportion of non-white male and a female population who were free (not slaves).
I have specifically colour-coded data referring to non-white free men and women in black and non-white slave men and women in white for easier visualization. From the visualization, I can clearly point out that Pennsylvania had the most number of free non-white men and women with almost 13,000 of them. It can also be identified that Pennsylvania, in fact, had a significantly lesser number of slaves after comparison. When looking at the graph, it is easy to notice that South Carolina has the greatest number of slaves in the United States with almost 57,000 of them as compared to only 3500 approx. free non-white people. A state with a comparatively balanced scale of both categories is Maryland with 11000 approx. non-white slaves and 10,000 approx. free non-white people.
To represent my visualization, I have chosen ‘Nonwhite: Slave >> Male’, ‘Nonwhite: Slave >> Female’, ‘Nonwhite: Free >> Male’, ‘Nonwhite: Free >> Female’ as data values as against state names in the United States of America. The column chart seemed to take less space and represent the data to easily understand as compared to other charts. I wanted to include a pie chart, but the information is sliced a lot and a pie chart did not seem to be a good fit as it only showed small partitions in the chart. It would have complicated the understanding of the data for my research question. The appearance was changed a bit so as to comfort the eyes and easily identify the colors of the columns. I think other visualizations such as Tableau would have worked as well but it takes some time to understand and mould the data as per the user requirements. Also, using Flourish was easier because it does all the calculations online and data stored in the cloud as compared to downloaded tableau on the desktop which has the risk of losing data in case the system crashes (unless it is also backed to the cloud).
This is a fantastic visualization of the data from 1810-1820 and I really like the aesthetic adjustments you made to this column graph. I think that the white and black columns create a nice contrast between the data. I also enjoyed reading about your interpretations of the graph and the historical implications of this data– Pennsylvania definitely sticks out, although this is expected given how the Quaker society long opposed the institution of slavery (and was among the first). I’m interested in seeing with the pie charts would have looked like by comparison, but in general they are not the strongest data visuals (as you noted). Excellent work and interpretations of this column graph!