For this project, my partners Keerthana, Hadar, and myself chose to look at extinct languages. Wikipedia has a great list here. The assignment was for mapping, and as these languages were from all across the globe, we figured it would be an interesting and appropriate task.
After we cleaned the data - reducing and converting times such as Dec 6 2016, and mid-1900’s, to a single year - we had a nice list from which to build some visuals. This would help us understand what we were really working with. This is what we came up with:
This shows clearly that the US leads the race - from the data we have at our disposal. There are a number of ways to go from here, represent the data with an icon to show the death, add lines to make the data more legible. Put it on a map. Put it on a map that changes over time. And so forth. Source code here
We had a great time working on this, but boy does working with data take some time! We definitely want to develop this concept further. Especially looking into completing, or at least getting some verification on our data set itself. That is one aspect of this project that was eye opening, is the research aspect involved. Data sets cannot be trusted in and of themselves, and necessarily require intense verification. This we did not do, as we were concerned with getting to square one - which again, took quite a while, but was fun! And we learned a lot. Which is always the most important thing, especially while in school.