I decided to show a few different graphs, because each of them shows a different way to read the data. I would say that figure 1 overall is more useful for seeing what the rankings were for each year. This is because the y axis is the year, and the x axis is the ranking. A very important augmentation that I made to this graph was adding labels for the names for each point on the graph. Otherwise, it would have been just a bunch of blank data points. You can very easily compare what the certain rankings were each year, for you can tell that Jack and Hannah were ranked second in 2001 quite easily, even if the year itself was covered. I couldn’t find a way to make that more visible, but it’s possible to figure out after a while. I had a hard time finding a graph format that made sense for this dataset, because I wanted to show how a name’s rank changed each year. That definitely is the strength of figure 2, because it has name on the y axis, which shows how the rank for each name changes per year. You can easily see the change in ranking for individual name, but harder for comparing year by year, or how an individual rank has different names for each year. Figure 2 also allows you to see which names were in the ranking all ten years, as well as the ones that were in there for only a few years. I think that both graphs in tandem allow for all the data I want to be understood to be easily seen. I think that this dataset and these graphs provide an compelling example of how Digital Humanities are important. DH is important because it allows for easy visualization of information, particularly in the realm of graphs, which is something that Lin talked about in her lecture.
