Photo Essay Response

In a post written by "The Guardian," it talks about a brave and courageous swim done by a group of young girls across the English Channel to raise money for Child Poverty Action Group. What amazes me most about this is that some of the girls who completed this swim were as young as eleven years old and that they did the swim across more than once. During the time of this swim, the waters were very cold and full of jellyfish. I find it amazing that even in these types of conditions, the girls were still fully willing to continue they're dangerous and treacherous journey ahead of them. One of the girls, specifically, said that only five weeks before the swim, she had her appendix removed but still pulled through with completing the swim. 

 A quote from one of the girls while swimming was, "It was kind of scary jumping in for the first time because I was cold and there were three jellyfish right next to the ladder. It was cold the entire time and there was one part where I was swimming through this mucky greasy part and there were jellyfish that kept stinging me, completely surrounding me." This description gave me a clear understanding of how irritating it would have been and almost makes me feel bad for them doing this. Overall, it was amazing to see the different ways people organize these type of events for good causes, even if it goes as far as this did. 

Photos from: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/26/the-sea-gals-swim-the-channel-photo-essay

Erasure Poem

This is a poem I found online and have made into an erasure poem. Hope you enjoy!

Had he and I but met

    By some old ancient inn,

We should have set us down to wet

    Right many a nipperkin! 

But ranged as infantry,

    And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

    And killed him in his place. 

I shot him dead because--

    Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

    That's clear enough; although 

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

    Off-hand like--just as I--

Was out of work--had sold his traps--

    No other reason why. 

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

    You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat, if met where any bar is,

    Or help to half a crown.

Source: https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-man-he-killed-by-thomas-hardy

Voyant/Ngram Observations

On the left is a screenshot of after inserting all of my blog posts into the section in "Voyant." It gave me a group of words of which I used the most and the ones that were used more than others will be bigger compared to the ones used less throughout every blog of mine.

Below are two screenshots I took of the program "Voyant" that show some other pretty interesting information about my blog posts. On the left it showed me what phrases I used the most throughout all posts, although since my posts consisted of mostly paragraphs, there weren't too many phrases being used multiple times. If there was a phrase used more than once, the highest amount it got to was only being used twice. The screenshot on the right portrays a different way of visualization with a type of line graph to show how many times a word was used and also when, in my documents, it was written.

The other program I used to get deeper information about my blogs was Google's "Ngram." This program is used to see how much a certain word was used in different time periods. For mine, I used a few of the top words written in my blogs that I thought would be relevant with each other. Two of the words I chose have been used since even before the 1800's, unlike three other words I picked that weren't used nearly as much in the 1800's and all the way up until now. I believe this is because the two words I picked that had a lot of usage were very common words that were and are still used much today. On the other hand, the three words that weren't brought up too much are more specific words that have more relevance to times closer to now rather than earlier dates.

What a Data Visualization Is

Data can be portrayed in various types of ways such as writing out sentences about your data, pictures of data, bar graphs, etc., but a very efficient way of doing this is by using data visualization. This method is a way to look at a chunk of data in a way where you don't have to read much, but just look at it and get a pretty good sense of what is it telling you. The main way of doing this is usually by a graph, chart, table, etc. to portray the data you have collected.


One specific type of visualization I looked at was called tree mapping. This was an interesting way of portraying information to people because it uses different sizes of shapes such as squares or circles to show how much more or less one thing is compared to another. For instance, one piece of visualization that used tree mapping was one where it showed popular fake news throughout the years 2017-2018. The bigger the square was, the more times that news was viewed or spread.

Above is an example of a tree map showing the amount of votes each candidate got in different states

Another type of tree map I viewed that was interesting was one about the amount of breaches and hacks that happened in big companies and organizations throughout the last few years. These include some pretty popular ones such as Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Apple and more. This tree map is a bit different than the usual because of the use of circles all around each other rather than squares all lined up perfectly together. In my opinion, this doesn't make the visualization easier or harder to look at, but just a different, interesting way of showing collected data. With all of these different sized circles shown, you can also hold your mouse over it to give the user a brief description of what happened with the hacks and breaches. Below are a couple of screenshots I took of the tree map I described. The one of the left just shows a portion of it, and on the right side it shows an example of a brief description about Facebook and the breaches it has had in 2019.