The Unemployed in the New England Region: 2004-2008, A Visualization

Motivation

Once in awhile among the headlines, the news media will cover a story featuring the life and struggles of a person and their family as they adjust their lives financially while searching for employment. For the most part, however, the media features stories about the volatileness of the Dow Jones as it plunges further in its index. Information about unemployment is given to us abstractly in the form of monthly rising unemployment rates per state. From this perspective, instead of seeing the human element, it becomes partially lost as in the actual number of people laid off.

I personally wanted to do this project as I work at Harvard which is going through its own phases of layoffs which would directly impact me, my family, and my studies, if I were to become unemployed. I decided to make a visual that would provide detailed information beyond the coverage of faltering points of the Dow by posing the question, "Which specific groups are being affected by the recession in the United States?" For the project, I narrowed my scope by covering the New England states between the years 2004 - 2008 since the only current data available for 2009 (as of April, 2009) appears as monthly unemployment rates per state.

Another motivation in creating a visualization is that I find that the online site, Bureau of Labor Statistics is difficult to navigate to find information about unemployment in the US which is located at their Local Area Statistics (LAUS) program. There, a viewer needs to scroll down to the tables and maps (1st image below), and peruse through the many links to find what one is searching for. I hope that my vizualization will be more flexible, faster, and easier to interact with, rather than following links to static pages (2nd image below).

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