Final Project for Interactive Data Studio, Fall 2020
For my project, I will be exploring mass shootings in the United States. To do so, I will be using the Mother Jones Mass Shootings Database which includes incidents from 1982 to 2020. Using this database, I will analyze the race of the shooters, the predominant gender of mass shooters, and analyze the location types of the mass shootings.
This project was in part inspired by the recent police shootings and by the recent Black lives matter protests as most people assume that a shooter is Black once they hear shooting, which is why I plan to analyze the race of the shooters.
The information from this project could be used for a variety of audiences. It can be used to show what types of places are more prone to mass shooting violence so that those places could improve security and police presences. It could also be used to bring attention to mass shooting violence in the United States to create a push to stop this type of violence.
The data I will be using for my project is a database created and maintained by Mother Jones using Google Sheets and is called the Mother Jones - Mass Shootings Database, 1982 - 2020. Since this database is comprehensive, I do not anticipate any issues with using the data from this database. The database has a record of 91 mass shooting incidents spanning 4/20/1999 to 12/10/2019 and contains 24 columns, which I will be reducing to 15 columns in a CSV file.
The final dataset will have the following features:
The layout of the visualization will be a webpage with an incident map, a shooting location tree map organized by total victim count of each shooting type, two timelines one for each decade, a tree map of the cases organized by the total victim count, and two waffle charts showing shooter demographics (one for race and another for gender), as well as text throughout the page.
More information on the layout and the visualizations can be found in the project pitch deck.
