For this week I decided that my research topic for this week would be discussing the difference between nonwhite enslaved individuals and nonwhite free individuals in the 1840’s.
The building of this map was a bit challenging as I would like to say I have a harder time creating maps with large sets of data attached to them. I found it very difficult to pinpoint the topics I wanted to research. With a little time and patience, I was able to upload my data and start creating my map. I had a few hurdles to jump over with trying to figure out how to create labels and making sure that the legend was correctly showcasing what I wanted to be demonstrated. I chose this topic because it was super close to the so-called “freeing” of enslaved individuals and the Emancipation Proclamation. I just wanted to see what difference in numbers between nonwhite enslaved and nonwhite free.
In the graph, you notice that the light purple depicts the nonwhite free and that there are around 22,000 in the 1840s. As for the light blue correlated with the enslaved nonwhites and how that was near 60,000 individuals. It just shows that even with the tension between the north and the south, there was still a long way to go to dismantle such a large institution that was used to help the United States.
I chose the grouped bar graph to depict what I wanted. I think the bar chart can show the magnitude of how many enslaved individuals were still in captivity even with the nearing of the Civil War. I definitely played around with the different types of charts to see if this data could be shown differently. They were interesting but I think the grouped bar graph would give the most information and stand out so much easier than the other types of charts. I think the bar chart does a good job of portraying data to be compared like mine. A line graph or column chart wouldn’t have worked. I wanted the chart to be easy to understand. I changed the colors to a pastel color scheme and gave the axis titles. The graph looks really nice and I believe that if someone was to look at this, they would have an easy time comprehending what is being shown.
