Alex Ossola
When a person travels to a new country, there are a lot of elements of culture to consider: Do the locals speak my language? Is dinner served at 10 PM? Should I dress more or less conservatively? But another important element of culture is alcohol consumption--not just the frequency with which the citizens imbibe, but also the type of liquor they prefer. Where cultural reach surpasses international borders, some alcoholic affinities can give insights into some countries' subtle similarities, and maybe even hearken back to a colonial period. Here's a list of national liquors by country (not all countries are listed), which I could use as my raw data. Visually, I would like to start with a base of a world map. I could envision each country being covered with a label for a particular type of alcohol, like they do in this map. The only issue is that each country has a different brand of alcohol, so I would probably just have to pick one. Another cool way to imagine it (and, frankly, the way I prefer) is to fill in the borders of each country with a close-up of the type of liquid-- so, Australia, for example, would just look like you're staring into a pint of beer. This gets complicated with something like aguardiente, which is clear. I'd also like to have little facts when you hover your mouse over each country, like the name of the national liquor and its most popular brand. But I think it could be cool. I'd have to learn to do most of the things with the map, especially how to overlay the image, but a lot of it is reminiscent of the work we did with the map of the US in class. Human source: cultural anthropologist who specializes in alcohol, such as Dwight B. Heath at Brown University. Publication: National Geographic?, Quartz, The Verge.
With a greater population to feed and fewer resources to do it, overfishing has been a systemic problem for decades. But, as it turns out, curbing overfishing has been one of the biggest success stories in recent government initiatives in environmentalism. However, the question remains: how fast are oceans around the US being repopulated? Is this fast enough? Every quarter NOAA releases data on the status of overfishing in US oceans, archived going back 10 years to 2003. I would like to do a time lapse video of a map of the US (kind of like this, but with oceans and, well, better) indicating how the major oceanic areas have improved (or not) over that period of time. I would use a color code for each status that NOAA designates (overfished, subject to overfishing, not overfished, etc.), with the colors a very light shade of blue/white if the area is overfished and returning to a healthy deep blue once it's not overfished. I would want to write a paragraph or two to accompany the map and would reach out to experts to explain any anomalies in the data (changes caused by weather events, for example). I would have to learn how to modify the color in the appropriate oceans as well as how to do a time lapse video. Publication: Washington Post or environmental publication (OnEarth, Climate Central, etc.).
Everyone knows that pop songs are kind of formulaic. Despite this lack of creativity and many intellectual reservations, many of us find ourselves bobbing along with the beat of songs as atrocious as "Timber". But how similar are these songs, structurally? Each song has distinct parts -- introduction, chorus, verse, etc. What I'd like to do, somewhat inspired by Amanda's movie trailer map, is compare the structure for 10 of the top 40 songs. Unfortunately I don't think there's a place on the Internet that categorizes the different parts of each song by time, but I have enough musical training in my past to be able to distinguish the parts of the songs from one another. My vision is to line up different horizontal bars to represent each song and have the bars change color for each different part of the song-- yellow for verse, pink for chorus, etc. I would have to learn how to do all of that pretty much. With my limited coding skills, it might be more fun for me to represent this data in the audio format, which I do have a lot of experience with. I could use 1-2 songs as examples, using statistics-- x percent of the top 10 songs started on their first verse after 20 seconds, etc. Human source: specialist in music theory/structure or music producer. Publication: Rolling Stone
Thanks! Looking forward to your feedback. -Alex
