For the assignment, I decided to visualize the leading causes of death in New York City. Using data from NYC Open Data, I wanted to study which causes of death affected different racial and ethnic groups. I created two visualizations on Tableau Public. I have never really used the platform before and struggled a little bit. One of the most challenging parts of making the visualizations was the inconsistencies in the dataset. In the Race and Ethnicity columns, there were different ways of labeling the same group. For example, Non-Hispanic Black and Black Non-Hispanic were showing up as other labels. I figured out how to use Tableau’s calculated fields to clean the data and make the data consistent. I also wanted to graph the total death rates but a lot of the data had missing values. At first, I thought about removing these values but reflecting on “Against Cleaning”, I wondered what information would be hidden or lost if I cleaned the data too much.  

The line graph, Leading Causes of Death in NYC, 2007-2022, shows the top 5 causes of death in NYC, including Diseases of the Heart, All other causes, Malignant neoplasms (cancers), Influenza and Pneumonia, and COVID-19. In 2020, you can see the large increase in deaths caused by COVID-19 and the drop that followed as vaccines and public health measures were implemented

The second visualization, “Trends in Leading Causes of Deaths by Race/Ethnicity, NYC (2015-2021), shows how causes of death affected different racial and ethnic groups. The graph uses a gradient where dark larger red squares represent higher death rates.