Exploring History Through Visualizations

By: Declan

In the spring of 2020, I completed a course called Data Visualization (590V) at UMass Amherst. Throughout the class in both its physical and online components, (thanks COVID) we explored both the psychology of visualizations and learned how to implement our own within the javascript D3 library. With a couple great students I met in the class, for our main project we created a set of visualizations to explore data from various Super Smash Melee tournaments hosted at UMass. The project can be found here.

Later, I set out to make an interesting visualization for some data I had stumbled across while researching the air war during World War 2. The small table listed annual production quantities of total aircraft for each major nation during the war. I had previously learned lots about the Battle of Britain, the depletion of the Luftwaffe and the supremacy of the Japanese Zero but I wanted to explore in this dataset how the momentum of the war shifted with aircraft volumes. Air superiority and therfore the winner of the air war most significantly depends on the density of aircraft due to the importance of tailing within dogfights. This chart however excludes several factors that would also influence a nation’s influence in the air such as pilot training rates, aircraft type and production quality.

Check it out on Observable.