As reported on Wired.
BY VALENTINA PALLADINO
Arcing lines represent each victim’s saga. Image: screenshot
Data visualization firm Periscopic has developed a somber but thoughtful graphic showing the number of gun deaths in the United States in 2010 in terms of years of life that could have been.
The project, officially launched on Monday, started out as an internal exploration of data for Periscopic co-founders Dino Citraro and Kim Rees and their team, and quickly became a compelling visual project about gun violence. The page opens with tickers counting the number of people murdered by guns in the United States in 2010 by month (as reported by the Unified Crimes Report), as well as the number of stolen years those people could have lived. Curved lines flow across the screen, changing colors when a person dies. Citraro wanted the illustration to bring life to the potential that was lost.
“We chose to illustrate the vibrancy of their lives as bright orange and yellow arcs, reminiscent of flames in the darkness,” he says. “When that person is killed, we create an alternate life for them, a ghost life — a life that may have happened if they hadn’t been shot and killed. This alternate arc is shown in gray, reminiscent of ash. The idea of using arcs is to harken to the nature of life — a birth, growth, an apex, a diminishment, and finally death.”
The result is a feather-like graph documenting lives lost by nearly 10,000 people in just one year. At first glance it may seem nondescript, but hover over the lines of the graph and you get information about the person the line represents, including age, gender, race, their relationship to the killer, and predicted information about when and how they could have died years later. Users can also filter the data by categories such as gun type, region, and ethnicity, gender, and age of the victim. Citraro’s intent is that these pieces of information help create a human connection.
“We’re hoping that people will see these individual victims,” Citraro says. “We’re not looking at aggregate numbers. We’re not trying to analyze this data. This data was living and breathing, and has now been extinguished. We’re hoping the viewer can make an emotional connection with these victims and that it sticks with them moving forward.”
If nothing, this visualization by Periscopic is a testament to how going one step further with data can make a big difference. It would have been easy to stop at the number of people killed by guns, but putting a different spin on the data and emphasizing the years of life that could have been lived makes it that much more engaging. With beautifully illustrated interaction, this graphic lets us see history in terms of what could have been the future.