Hacking the Humanities Midterm: Uncanny X-Men Character Actions

This data visualization project represents the actions of various characters from the Uncanny X-Men comic book series. My source was this data set that was put together by The Claremont Run.

This data set did not need intensive cleaning. Thus, I used excel for all my cleaning and reformatting purposes. For example, I used "find and replace" to get rid of a lot of asterisks next to numerical values. These asterisks correlated to notes. These notes were used by data scrapers to clarify certain data they felt was important. I also changed to formatting of the issue numbers column to include the "#" sign, so that when the issue nuber appeared in the chart, it was easier to distinguish that it was an issue number and not the size of the bar.

I used Flourish to proccess and visualize the data. Flourish is an incredible site for most data visualization purposes. It is easy to learn and makes editing charts relatively easy. I spent a lot of time looking through the various graph formats they offered in order to find one that can communicate the data set well. On top of that, a large portion of my time was spent figuring out how to get the data into the charts the way I wanted. In other words, how could I make the bars be sized by the number of times a character was killed rather than the current issue number? How do I set up the filters properly? I played around with the visuals a bit as well to make it easy on the eyes. I highly recommend Floruish to others and will likely return myself.

This data presentation can be great for Marvel lovers. I can imagine two friends debating about the Uncanny X-Men series and using this graph as a tool. "The Wolverine never gets beat! Thats why he's better than Cyclops!" "Well he was rendered unconscious more times throughout the series than Cyclops!" Although this specific project is fun for Marvel nerds like me, this data visualization software is phenomenal for clearly communicating data. It allows viewers to see noticable patterns across filters of their choosing. This helps them digest the data and understand it fully.

I wanted to practice my HTML, so this page was written by me from entirely from scratch!