I wanted to use a data set that means a great deal to me. I love the ocean and I love Maine lighthouses. I found a data set from https://hub.arcgis.com/datasets/maine::maine-lighthouses-geolibrary/about that had some longitude and latitude variables as well as status of the lighthouses. I wanted to analyze the active lighthouses vs inactive and demolished. I removed image links and global ID variables from the data set that I downloaded as I felt they would only take up more resources and were not needed for this report.
Non-Map Interactive Bar chart
My first visual is an interactive bar chart that give details when hovering over the individual bars.
Code
library(tidyverse)library(plotly)library(leaflet)lighthouses <-read_csv("C:/Users/shann/OneDrive/Desktop/Maine_Lighthouses_GeoLibrary.csv")status_counts <- lighthouses |>group_by(Status)|>summarise(Count =n())coastal_colors <-c("#5DA9E9", "#BFD7ED", "#88B04B","#FFE4B5")status_counts <- status_counts|>arrange(desc(Count))|>mutate(Status=factor(Status, levels=Status))plot_ly(status_counts, x=~Status, y=~Count, type ="bar", marker =list(color=coastal_colors))|>layout(title =" Status of Main's Coastal Lighthouses", font =list(size =16), xaxis =list(title ="Lighthouse Status"), yaxix =list(title ="Number of Lighthouses"))
This bar chart shows key patterns of the statuses of lighthouses in Maine. The active bar is the largest bar by far showing that most lighthouses in Maine are still active. I chose the bar chart for my visualization choice since it was a very quick way to tell the story of how most lighthouses in Maine are active and a very few are demolished or private/unknown. I feel that the effectiveness of my visual is very strong in terms of voicing that lighthouses in Maine are mostly active and it illuminates just how few lighthouses are not being used. This visual could use some more invested time to make changes like capitalizing the Status variables.
My second visual is the coast of Maine with lighthouse placements and hover over details.
For the lighthouses spacial patterns I chose to represent them as they are located on the cost of Maine. The visual captures how the lighthouses are spaced well enough to almost evenly cover the full coast. I also chose to have a lighthouse icon as the representation because I thought it will help identify what exactly it is showing on the map. I feel it it was important to illustrate the statuses of the lighthouses which identified gaps in the coast line. One can zoom in to locate, for instance, Dog Island Light, whose current status is unknown but deeper research proved to show that the lighthouse suffered damage from storms and had to be decomishioned. While the underlying cause of the unknown is not represented in this visual it does show that a majority of lighthouses are still active today. I would rate this visual as a 7 out of 10. I would like to have had more detail in the mapping but most other maps I had tried rather than the light grey outline proved to be too busy with streets or topographical layers that detracted from my desire to provide coastal lighthouse positions.
Conclusion
The bar chart and the leaflet visual worked together to show the quantity of lighthouses that are still active. The active lighthouses are a majority of lighthouses in Maine. I think additional questions from my analysis could be: Why are there so few demolished lighthouses? Why are there still so many active lighthouses when better technology exists for fishermen and sea faring passengers like sonar and telemetry and GPS. Are lighthouses more aesthetically useful at this point in modern day technology? I ran into limitations when trying to add a legend that included the icon of the lighthouse. I did not have a URL address for the images and this created a problem with the kind of control I was using. I think more enhancements could be made by having either a URL directing to the lighthouse websites for more details on each of the lighthouses or by having a drill down of just highlighting one status of lighthouses. Such as clicking on unknown and having only the unknown lighthouses showing.