ARTICLE: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/mortality-rates-united-states/
I was searching around the internet earlier today for articles that make good use of interactive media elements in their stories, and I stumbled upon several that caught my attention. The article I’ve decided to link here though, was certainly the most interesting. While it isn’t about the Coronavirus and pre-dates it by nearly 2 years, this article’s dark topic is unfortunately much more pertinent today than it was at its time of publication. As morbid as it is, we are completely surrounded by death at the moment – and death is exactly what this article is about. From FiveThirtyEight.com, the article I have chosen is an interactive map of the USA that shows mortality rates for leading causes of death in every U.S. county from 1980 to 2014
We’re all fascinated with death and what causes it to happen to those around us. This article lets you look at death, locally and across the entire country, under a microscope. The reader is encouraged to select from a large list of causes of death, the most common being cardiovascular disease and cancer, to see how each county in the country compares to one another in terms of deaths in the selected category. The statistics play out by deaths per 100k deaths. For example, cancer is ranked most common because out of every 100k deaths in the country, over 100 of those deaths will have resulted from cancer. Tuberculosis on the other hand ranks towards the bottom, as less than 10 deaths in every 100k occur because of Tuberculosis. One can then go into the map and hover over a specific county to view their statistics for any category of deaths for any year from 1980 to 2014. For example, Fillmore County in Nebraska has 13.3 deaths in every 100k deaths (I doubt 100k people die a year in that county, there must be some math and whatnot going on to make these numbers make sense, but that requires a smarter man than me) that happen because of self-harm. My home-county, Cattaraugus County (chest pound), unfortunately has more suicides it seems, with 13.8 deaths per every 100k being from self-harm.
The amount of information in this interactive article is actually quite astonishing. If you want to know, for whatever reason, how many people died from AIDS per 100k in all of Utah in 1996, you can easily find that out – it was 4.5, by the way. Overall, I think this is a fascinating article – almost entirely because it allows the user to access and interact with unique and complex information in an aesthetic and easily digestible way. Below the map too, there is an entire written article. While it is interesting and written well, it isn’t even integral to the user’s/reader’s enjoyment of the article. It does provide some interesting charts regarding the places in the country that have the lowest and highest mortality rates, and surely that is good and worthwhile information to know, but who cares about that when you can see how many people died from car crashes in any random county in Florida in 1984? It may not be the most crucial information to know, but I certainly learned a lot from this article.
The Pointless Blog 