Concept
For this week’s assignment, I was fascinated by the data visualization we did in class, so I wanted to create something similar using that technique. I was browsing the internet for inspiration and came across this website. In the video on the page, one of the data visualization ideas showed the Paris metro activity. This inspired me to visualize the London underground passenger traffic.
I had to create my own CSV file to obtain the data I needed. I used two different datasets from the Transport for London (TFL) website. One of them shows the total number of passengers using stations weekly, and another one shows the coordinates of the stations. I removed all the unnecessary columns and pasted the coordinates with the passenger counts and station names.
I ran into an error where the console said that some of the values it loaded from the CSV file were NaN, even though I made sure to delete any rows with no data. In previous data science classes I took, we always added a check to ensure we were only taking valid values, so I did the same in this sketch. I made new arrays that only add values that are not NaN.
I also added a feature to allow you to check the station name and the number of weekly passengers when you hover the mouse over it.
Reflection
Despite my love for the technique of data visualization, this is not one of my proudest works simply because I was extremely busy this week and could not dedicate as much time as I wanted to on this sketch. In the future, I would definitely like to add a map of London in the background and also to space the circles out in a way where you can actually see each station since there is a lot of overlapping circles and you are not able to properly see each station when you hover your mouse.