In this section, I will focus on giving a few of my comments and an overall conclusions of my opinion of this visualization.

 

Things I liked: 

 

There were a few features that really sticked out to me while going through this application.  First off, I was really astonished to find that this whole research project was done in the span of just 4 months!  Here is a quote from their 'About' section highlighting this:

 

       "This is rapid-response research, something rarely attempted by academic institutions, in which we frame our study, settle on emphasis and questions, then go immediately into the field in the six countries, gathering data, analyzing it and preparing it for publication in less than four months. We are concerned with fresh information, and in connecting that information to the academic and professional media communities, as well as others, with dispatch. Changes in the field suggest that this is necessary to avoid perishable information. At the same time, we recognize that radical changes over a two year period are not likely, so it is the incremental contours of the study that tell the story of new developments. Even subtle changes, however, can be instructive as they will likely affect tens of thousands, if not millions, of viewers and users, not to mention the economic impact and social consequences that a small movement of the media metric dial can have."

 

Going off of that, it was really interesting how many different fronts they were able to cover with these 6 different countries.  Furthermore, the large set of demographics really allowed the users to get a solid feel for a very specific group of people.  When setting up a visualization, it is important to remember to be able to take very general data and convert it to/show niche data as well which they have done a wonderful job of (as seen below).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Finally, the combination of colors used were perfect and well coordinated throughout all the different options of the visualization.  

 

 

Things I disliked:

 

There was very little I disliked about this application.  First off, I know this is not a fault of the visualization or the researchers, but missing data is always an annoyance when trying to draw conclusions upon a dataset.  In this particular study, there were many times when there was not any data from 2013 which made it hard to draw conclusions.  

 

Another small fault I noticed was how the data was loaded in.  The only reason I noticed this was due to my slower internet at home.  For the different categories on the right, the data was loaded in over and over again when changing categories.  When changing filters that was not the case however.  This is just a minor inconvenience, but was noticable on a slower connection.

 

 

Conclusion:

 

Overall, this was a very well designed and constructed visualization that outlined a large dataset showing various comparisons between many different demographics.  There was a lot to be learned by playing around with this app, and also reading the documentation provided by the researchers/authors.  In the end, I learned a good deal from it and enjoyed this project thoroughly.