Mapping Transfeminicide

Posted on 1st April 2021 by Syennie Valeria

It’s strange that I couldn’t find any Wikipedia either for Transfeminicide or Transphobic Femicide. I also couldn’t find the definition of this term on Merriam-Webster. I guess this word based on the term “Femicide” which according to Merriam-Webster refers to the gender-based murder of a woman or girl by a man and first known used in 1976. So, transfeminicide could also means anti-trans violence, especially against transgender women.

I first encountered to this topic few years ago when I started to take a Voguing class in Berlin. My dance teacher recommended us to watch the movie Paris is Burning, a tragic documentary film about the ball culture in New York city mostly for Afro-American, Latino gay, transgender community. I guess, we knew that transgender as a minority mostly experience discrimination in the society, probably it’s also because how they’ve been represented in the media. Another documenter film on Netflix, Disclosure, follows in-depth look at Hollywood’s depiction transgender people and the impact of their stories on transgender lives and American culture.

For our Unit 2 class with Llwelyn, we could chose a topic to build our own project in p5.js. I knew that I wanted to do a project about gender issue so I started to search for the data set and found an interesting data on Kaggle with the hashtag Queer Women Violence and more specifically transfeminicides. From this dataset, I started to set up the plan of how I wanted to show the data using P5.

I was aware that javascript is not my expertise yet and I still find difficulties to code, so I didn’t want to set a high expectation but just wanted to learn of how I could manage a project from scratch. Since there’s an information about Latitude and Longitude in the dataset, I knew that I am gonna create a project based on maps.

One of my inspiration is Queering The Map website. Because there’s an information about cause of death, so I aimed to include this information and put it in the category. This approach reminds me of my previous project for the Unit 01 to show Black Lives Matter victims.

I found so many obstacles during the project especially to understand using the function. Realising my limitation, I contacted the digital space at LCC to ask a help from Edmund. He helped me to solve some problems that I encountered. After I compared how different the approach that Llwelyn and Edmund took, I came to realised that we can code with different ways and end up with the same result. However one way could be more efficient than the others.

There are so many categories in the dataset with up to 3 death causes for each victims, so I categorised it by shape and colours. To be honest, I didn’t focus on this because my aim is to focus more on the coding side rather than spending too much time thinking about the dataset.

My initial sketch for the prototype using adobe illustrator.

The process to map the point where the violence happened.

One of examples of the problem, that the label appeared behind the maps and shapes.

We spent few weeks to finish this project, however I didn’t feel that I dedicate my time too much in this project because it was also during the weeks of our first assessment for Unit 01. I realise that my code is not efficient enough because I wrote all the shapes and colours one by one. I’ve asked Llwelyn and Edmund about this but it seemed that we should spend more time to crack this issue. Regarding the dataset, I also questioned if all data represents transfeminicides because I found some causes related to Covid-19. I am sure this data also doesn’t represent all victims around the world because it shows more victims in the US and very little in Africa, for example.

I also think that my code still has some missing points and still far from perfect. I was thinking to generate it with creative coding for the finishing but this would take more time. So at the moment, I feel all right to just be able to do a coding project from scratch which I couldn’t imagine when I first started learning P5.

First Time Using Blender

Posted on 19th February 2021 by Syennie Valeria

I just finished the blender’s class with Ian Carr and I really enjoyed it. Blender is great for either making something creative or incorporating data to be 3D objects. However I am still having difficulty in working with blender since it’s my first time. So, for example I wasn’t sure how to give a background and to render the animation. I looked at some youtube tutorials but I guess I am not good in learning from the video so I couldn’t manage it and in the end I edited the background in adobe photoshop and didn’t create an animation. This is the beginning, so it’s not too bad to cheat a bit but I am excited to learn more about blender!

For the basic task, Ian asked us to get some of our personal data from our phone. Since I just started to meditate more regularly, so I wanted to visualise my meditation data through INSIGHT, a great meditation app with a community concept that I could recommend! But this data doesn’t 100% represent my meditation routine because sometime I meditate without the app. However, it’s great to see that I’ve added meditation as my routine now!

I visualised my meditation routine from Friday to Friday.

The graph above shows the time I spent to meditate and the second graph below it shows how many time I meditate a day.

Surprisingly today I meditated more and longer than any other days before!

In terms of blender, I am not fully satisfy with my result but this is a good start to try more and explore my idea using this software. Thanks Ian for teaching us today!

Maps on P5

Posted on 19th February 2021 by Syennie Valeria

I found mapping on P5 is interesting because I use Google Maps a lot and it’s interesting to know how people build the mapping. This app is so easy to use but in reality, behind that useful app it requires such a complicated coding. Even during the class, I wanted to just mapping my holiday route with my family and it was confusing in the beginning. I created a simple holiday route from London to Brighton, Oxford and last stop was Edinburgh. That was a memorable holiday, the very last holiday with my family before my mom passed away.

The map’s look is quite basic but I am just happy to manage the task, which is just to navigate the route. You can check the code here.

Another task was to trace a location using Geo Json. I wanted to trace Indonesia, but first I failed because I guess I downloaded a bad Geo Json file. But after I found an other source, it worked! You can check the code here.

Tracing my country. We have more than 13.000 islands!

Overall, the look is not that interesting and not beautiful at all, but this knowledge is so useful as a based to develop another map’s project. Even the basic look also requires a complexity. So, I won’t underestimate it.

Music on P5

Posted on 18th February 2021 by Syennie Valeria

I always trigger to do something with music but never had a chance beside created a piece of demo on garage band long time ago. I just love everything about music and music history! During the p5 class with Llewelyn, we learned how to incorporate music with graphic so it can be interactive. I still created something basic but I am curious to dig more about this topic!

Not a big fan of Andy Warhol, but the history of the factory, the Velvet Underground and those era have fascinated me since I was really young. So, inspired by the the famous piece of his artwork, Flowers (1964), I re-created a flower that responds to the music. The text is based on Warhol’s quote as well.

You can visit my sketch to play it. It’s fun!

Plastic Pollution Data

Posted on 24th December 2020 by Syennie Valeria

At Unit 2 with Tiz, we learned about creating a data story and a visual from dataset. This class has given me knowledge about many data practices as well as theories to create a good infographic. We explored this task with a dataset about plastic pollution that we could choose by our personal choice to develop further. I chose the dataset about global waste generation and management in many different countries because I thought this is interesting also to see how my country or Germany, where i used to live, generate their waste. The data are also from the same year, 2010, which made me think it more makes sense to compare it in one graph. So I am gonna explain about my process.

Created a mood board as our guideline to get the visual that we want to achieve.

This helped me a lot as an inspiration for my graph’s shape and later I adopted the colour from the sea urchins.

Later on, I gathered some infographics references and made my sketch.

From these datasets, I categorised countries of continents because there are many of them. I also added more data about GDP per capita to highlight high-income countries.

I generated the datasets on Raw Graph. All of them are Circle Packing!

I found many challenges during the process related to design and how to show the data correctly.

And this is my outcome. This graph depicts the plastic waste management of each country clustered by continent. And shows the plastic pollution impact in the oceans.

This is the feedback from Henrietta: “Lots of information here, one to sit down with for a while, but the density of the text is balanced well with the clear comparison between the continents in the main visual component. Not sure about the circles around the title and line length at the bottom is very long! You seem to have a real affinity with organic shapes – which you seem to be naturally (no pun intended) drawn to. It would be interesting to see you reflect on this perhaps in your writing for Unit 1, does it reflect an interest in the ‘people behind the numbers’ (Lupi. 2017) perhaps.”

I agree with her comments and also I think that I put too much information here as annotations. I would love to practice more as this one was my first infographic so there are so much things that I still need to learn.

Learning a New Language?

Posted on 6th December 2020 by Syennie Valeria

Every time I heard about the word “coding”, I always thought that it’s definitely not my thing because it’s full of numbers and just too complicated. However I always admire people who create creative coding. My feeling was mixed when we first learned P5! Even though we started from the basic but I still found it’s hard to adjust my brain in this programming language. I am still trying to understand this Java Script language but I am optimistic that everyone could do it if there’s a will. Learning a new language is always a challenge, like when I learned german. It was full of tears but now I am comfortable with it. I hope I am gonna achieve that in P5 as well.

After the class, I tried to learn from various sources. I managed to create some visuals and it made me happy to combine graphic design and colours with coding!

This visual I developed from the class with Llwelyn last Friday

This one I learned from creative coding class with Ed from tech lab.

You can check out how it works here: first image, second image and third image.

Mobile VS Desktop

Posted on 23rd November 2020 by Syennie Valeria

Learning Excel and Statistic is a real challenge! As someone who always work with pictures, excel tables and numbers could be intimidated. But we’re here to learn and I am happy to get a chance learning it from the start.

Jovan gave us the task to create a visualisation from scratch. I was in group 1 with Martyna and Imy. We got the task to make a graph presenting the percentage of Desktop and Mobile devices. We came out with two stories idea; either comparing the usage based on daily usage (weekday and weekend) or big events. Later we chose to compare it based on big events, that first we thought could be interesting but later we realized that it was probably not a good choice. Why? Because in the end we felt that this topic was not the best for our current abilities and also for this exercise.

So here I am gonna show you the process and case study.

First we gathered all the big events in 2020. It looks interesting, isn’t it?

Secondly, we made some sketches. These are sketches that I made.

And then we searched the page view trend on Wikipedia Data for each events. After that, we calculated the mobile percentages.

This part took so much time, so we tried to reduce the events from ten to four. But still, it didn’t help regarding the time we had. In the end, we decided to just choose one event, which is Black Lives Matter, that has more distinction between the usage. After the death of George Floyd in 25th May 2020, there was a big increased in both desktop and mobile view.

The graph shows an increase of mobile usage.

Overall, we’re not satisfied with our outcome. We hope that we could try again with another approach and aim to create a better story. We emailed Jovan about that and still waiting for his advice.

I think it’s not too bad that we faced this difficulties so we can learn from this experience.

Data Vis Journal

A graphic designer who's learning about data visualisation

Tag Archives: Unit 2