Research Question: Which state had the least slaves?
Building this visualization went pretty smoothly. The PDF really helped! Instead of saving the data and inputting it, however, I transferred it directly from my computer to Flourish because my Mac was being weird. Nevertheless, this worked really well.
I chose the number of enslaved pe0ple by the state for my data because I wanted to see which state had the least amount of enslaved people. I figured South Carolina was going to have the most enslaved population (it did), so I wasn’t particularly curious which state would have the most. As for the least, it appeared the Indiana Territory had the least number of enslaved people. This made sense to me. However, I was strangely surprised New York had such a high population of enslaved people. I don’t know why, I just wasn’t anticipating it to be as high as it was (2,257). I assumed it would be under 2,000 and barely surpassing 1,500. I was also surprised because Georgia had a lower enslavement population than I would have thought in the 1800s (9,049). Obviously it’s good that the population wasn’t as high as I had anticipated, but I was nevertheless surprised. In my APUSH class in high school, we talked a lot about the south and about states like Georgia having dense slave populations. This is not to say 9,049 isn’t a lot of people and isn’t terrible, just that I thought that number would surpass 10,000. Thankfully it didn’t.
I utilized a column graph for my data because I felt it best represented my data. A column graph made reading the data significantly easier. Line graphs would have looked strange and been difficult to read and weird. A pie chart would not work well for this data, personally. I think it wouldn’t visualize the data well. I chose a column graph over a bar graph because I felt the columns looked more visually appealing than the bars. While bars would’ve been sufficient and equally as readable, I prefer columns.
As for the scale, the scale was measured based on the enslavement population. The y-axis extended to 45,000 people and the x-axis labeled which state correlated to which data.
Great visualization and analysis of the data! It was great to see this spin-off visualization assignment in comparison to the data map construction. Although the map might be an effective way of connecting the data to the geography, your bar chart offers another perspective that can compare different states with more ease. Your findings– especially regarding New York and Georgia– are definitely interesting. I need to revisit this census data because as I noted in class, the number of enslaved people represented in any of the data sets is misleading (knowing that millions were enslaved). So while all of our graphs might be honest and accurate, it is good to take them with a grain of salt and think about the likelihood that most enslaved people weren’t represented in the census. As for your visualization, I agree that the column chart works well– I think they are so much easier to read than bar charts. Thank you for sharing these excellent observations!