Final Project (Shift/) Proposal
Posted: December 4th, 2009 | Author: Bobby | Filed under: Assignments | Tags: obituaries | Comments Off- OverviewAn exploration of the NYTimes obituary to examine what is supposed to be the most notable people to have died on a given day. This very very short daily list is then contrasted against the much larger set of likely mundane, but certainly much more varied nation-wide set of newspaper obituaries. This exercise seeks to both bring attention to the large number of deaths that occur every day and find an alternative snapshot of what the American life is through its daily deceased.
- DataMy data sets will be the NYTimes Article Search API (searching for “obituary”) + an RSS feeds from the site obituaries101.com located at http://www.big101.com/obituary_search_find_famous_death_notices.php.
- Design QuestionsMy initial approach is to use scale and variation in type size to underline how small of a snapshot the NYTimes obituary section is of the greater body of obituaries in the United States. I’m not exactly sure if I will be using any graphics as text is a central part of this exploration.
- Precedents
- Rupa’s project, Out of Sight, Out of Mind, dealing with visualizing deaths and she was previously mentioning the use of bar graphs to identify spikes in casualties across time.
- NPR did a radio show called The Art of the Obituary which revealed the behind-the-scenes process of identifying aging members of society of note and prewriting and subsequently updating obituaries. Hearing this story when it aired a number of years ago really piqued my interest in the topic of obituary writing.
- Almost forgot the most striking infographic I’ve seen that related to death: the visualization of suicides on the Golden Gate Bridge: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/object/article?f=/c/a/2005/10/30/MNG2NFF7KI1.DTL&m=/c/pictures/2005/10/30/mn_suicide30_loc_tt.gif.
