Visualization showing the frequency and hometowns of record by County for Fallen Service members from Iraq (OIF) and Afghanistan (OEF) Wars
The state of Wisconsin has maintained a unique place in the nation by maintaining an urban to rural ratio of 25-75 that hasn’t changed much in over 30 years. The figure to the right presents more rural areas in the darkest greens and progressing towards the brown colored counties through the brightest yellows for the most urban areas. While most places are becoming more urban, Wisconsin remains a holdout to this trend.
There has been a total of 6858 US military and DOD civilian casualties as of Feb 17th, 2020 hailing from across America. A Wisconsin city or town was the hometown or record for 123 of those individuals who made the ultimate sacrifice. Wisconsin has 72 counties and a population nearing 6 million.
The first Graph uses its main title line to represent all three graphs, while all three utilize their subtitle section with the blue to enable the “cool” transition between the graphs. It also allows the blue the disappear from the reader’s attention once that have been trained to focus on white, red, and the occasional grey. The second Graph shows our casualty rates adjusted for by population. This supports the idea that while cities are larger, they do not actually contribute any more than smaller rural areas. We see two "polar" Counties with Outagamie and Winnebago. These two adjoining counties in the center of the graph show Outagamie having the most extreme number of fallen soldiers for its population size on the high end, while Winnebago has the most extreme number of fallen for its population size in terms of how few soldiers were lost. The third Graph takes the casualties for every county, then corrects for population by county as a proportion of the total state population, and finally presents the same information but corrected by population density. The average expected casualty rate for a county given a certain population will be the middle color shading on the scale. The lower the number of casualties for a county given its population the whiter it will be. The more casualties for a county given its population, the redder it will be. Here was see that most counties are below the expected or the average, and our outlier counties consisting of most the ten urban areas for the State of Wisconsin being brought to our attention by the red presence. Southeast Wisconsin is our area of impact.
I am making this publicly available, both the data set and the visualization code to hopefully see how the collective "we" better handles both the data and the communication of it to the world.