Visual Displays of School Shooting Data

Abstract

In order to understand and track emerging trends in school violence, there is no better resource than our current population. Sixty-eight million Americans have a Twitter account and with the help of the GETAR (Global Events and Trend Archive Research) project, we were able to create datasets of tweets related to 10 school shooting events. Also, we have retrieved the URLs of news headlines relating to the same shootings. Our job is to use both datasets to develop visualizations that may depict emerging trends.

Based on the data that we had available, we were able to come up with a few ideas such as word clouds, maps, and timelines. The goal was to choose appropriate representations that would provide insight into the changing conversation America was having about gun violence. We have been successful in creating these visuals and shifted our focus to cleaning our data.