The final assignment for my Data Visualization Class at the CUNY Graduate Center, was a summer intensive course taught by Michelle McSweeney. The objective was to try to articulate a research project by trying to find the data from different datasets and to try to visualize and approve the research that I was working on.
The idea
My original idea actually came from two different inspirations. The first was my wife as she really wanted to use my visualizations and all my research at her job. Being director of the Greek National Tourism Organization, she was able to provide me with valuable datasets so I can work with my initial project. The second reason I chose to work on this project, was because I always wanted to learn if American citizens travel internationally, since the United States is a massive and diverse country to travel around without the need to go through foreign immigration queues.
Before coming to live in the US, I had heard various opinions (because I rarely met American travelers in different countries when I was travelling) that Americans do not travel to international destinations that much. The reasons were either its too expensive or too far or too time consuming or that Americans don’t get enough time off work as they have limited vacation time. I also heard that they do not prioritize an international trip because this is part of their culture. From the short time I’ve been living in the US, I realized that for an American, getting on a plane and visiting another local city is part of his/her daily routine more that I had imagined. So I was almost convinced that Americans do travel quiet a lot but I wasn’t sure if Americans travel a lot domestically rather than visiting international destinations with the same frequency. So I was ready to answer my questions by trying to prove though my visualizations that Americans do travel internationally and that this tendency is becoming even stronger in the last decade.

Data
As said, I found all my dataset from three different sources: National Travel & Tourism Office (https://travel.trade.gov/) Bureau of Transportation and Statistics (https://www.bts.gov/) and the other one private dataset that my wife is working at her tourism department. By comparing all those datasets in excel and csv formats I tried to join data, cleaning and sorting them and then imported to tableau data source with the hope to make some nice visualizations. In those data sets I found there were different time periods so I should focus to a certain period of time in order to have all my data set consistent. I filtered and ended that my visualizations has to be defined between the years 2000-2017.I was hoping to find even more recent ones but all the datasets haven’t updated the figures until 2019.

After I gave my proposal project I tried to assess all of my data sets and tried to find how I could visualize them better. I created all of charts for every data set but some of them couldn’t match. Some of the charts that I created didn’t have a nice flow to my storytelling and some of them, even they looked impressive, and they couldn’t monitor precisely the purpose of my data set preparation. I didn’t want to spend too much time massaging this data, so I quickly decided to only use an Excel spreadsheet and tried to clean and simplify them as much as possible. Then I joined three sheets in one and tried to use simple categories for each column. Some of the information had to be reconstructed as text and figures were confusing and some of the numbers needed to be converted integer .e.g. years .After advice of my classmate Kelly Hammock I managed to select all keyword dimensions that were stores in many columns of excel files and pivoted the data so I can summarize, sort, reorganize, group, count, total and average data stored in my database. Pivoting also helped me out to find typos and other inconsistencies

The Research
What I wanted to discover, for my own benefit and also for whoever was interested in learning that Americans do travel internationally within the last years. I had heard so many things about the mentality of Americans saying that they do not travel out of their country for different reasons. In many surveys that I have read and many European media have talked about American chauvinism, the fact that many Americans simply don’t care about much of anything happening outside of America unless there’s a chance it will directly affect them. So trying to see if such things are justified, I realized that almost the opposite is true. All the datasets that I was aggregating to make my story revealed that U.S. citizens have a huge desire to explore the rest of the world not only for holidays and leisure reasons but also for business, educational purposes, private and other travelling sectors. Of course I tried to expand this project in terms of making many more visualizations that approve the American interest to seek and explore other destinations. So apart from the datasets that finally used to make my visualizations there were also different datasets. What I originally found and also had in my final proposal were the following ones:
1. The purpose of the trip
2. Their activity participation while in other countries
3. What transportation do they use in other countries
4. What income percentage do they spend overseas
5. Information sources used for trip planning
6. Top ten departures for U.S. Citizens flying internationally

The survey was targeted more geographically due to our limitation of time. But because of my personal interest, I will try to complete all of them in the future towards a more integrated approach for US international travelers.

The Visualization process
For my visualization process I tried various charts in order to see which one fitS better to my data sets. I always had in my mind that charts have to be clear and simple as much as possible. Once my data were ready, I started to play around in Tableau with different chart types. What I created totally for that project was bubble charts, pie charts, tree charts, line charts, and stacked bar charts.
My first visualization revealed that US travelers prefer to visit countries where English is a spoken language. It is common that Americans and Europeans retain a common bond since ages. Europe seems to be the first priority in destinations for U.S travelers but UK and Ireland as English spoken countries “wore the crown”. In my first dashboard through a bubble and a pie chart, I managed to visualize effectively that Americans prefer to travel in English spoken countries in Europe. I also used bubble charts as I believe are extremely useful graphs for comparing the relationship between data objects in 3-numeric data dimensions: the X-axis data, the Y-axis data, and data represented by the bubble size.

Next I made a tree chart as I wanted to reveal where Americans travel in Europe. The visualization also was pointed out that UK and Ireland were also top destinations for the American travelers. I tried to cluster the European countries by different colors which I wanted be consistent with my previous charts depending on the level of interest of US Travelers. Apart from the English spoken languages it seemed that probably France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Netherlands have also preferred by US Travelers, since these countries have pretty strong cultures that snag people to them, and that obviously include Americans. I used a tree chart here as I wanted to analyze and graphically break down objectives into smaller and more manageable parts. More specifically I needed to reveal the preference of U.S. visitor depending on the European country and the total number of U.S. visitors to Europe always between 2000-2017.

For many Americans the allure of traveling abroad is becoming even stronger lately. Although as a nation the culture is extremely robust and powerful, their needs in terms of travel, vacation, business, education and other interesting things abroad motivate them for new explorations. This bubble chart reveals where Americans have traveled pretty much all over the world between 2000-2017. As said, European countries “wear the crown”. 1.056.000 Americans travelled in Europe in this time of that period. Central American holds the second choice for American including Mexico as one of their popular destination.
It should be noticed that Canada is not included in my data set as I categorized as a Northern American country. Also I ended up including Mexico, which is one of the favorite destination for American international travelers, as a country of Central America, so it happened to classify it as the second top destination for Americans. The well-organized data structure that I found form the United States Travel and Tourism Advisory Board contributed to a large extend in making a very clean and fresh bubble chart, ready to accomplish visually its goal.

Moving on my next visualization chart I managed to make an area chart showing the frequency of U.S. Travelers depending on the continent between 2000-2017.I used this type of chart as I wanted to show or compare a quantitative progression over time. The results satisfied my estimates as it was very clear in terms of what I wanted to point out per continent. A glance in that Area Chart confirms that Europe is number one destination for Americans over 17 years. Although there is a decreasing rate between 2008-2009 (I assume that Lehman Brothers bankruptcy affected that) Europe has always provided interesting insights into the preferences of American travelers. Central America, as said, is strong choice and the chart points out the huge increase of interest to visit those places. It should be noted that for Oceania we have to indicate also that (for Australia and New Zealand) the ration recorded a considerable decline since 2017. I tried to design my tooltips and labels as clear as possible with the numbers of the visitors in order to make my visualization more engaging and comprehensive.

My line chart was more successful form any of my charts and I heard a lot of beautiful comments from classmates and instructors regarding the colors and the creativity of the line chart. This particular was also made to display also the US interest to travel abroad. It shows here that, according to Forbes magazine the share of U.S. citizens holding a passport has increased dramatically over 17 years. According to BBC only 15 percent of Americans possessed a passport In 1996, though that’s still far more than in 1990 when just four percent had one.
In order to avoid misunderstandings in terms of historic events and also to get straight to the point I had to point out some the following clarifications: In 2007 a grant total of more 18 million passports were issued in the U.S. The pace of growth accelerated further in 2007 in 18 million passports when U.S. citizens traveling by air between the U.S. and Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean were required to have a valid passport. Previously, it was possible for them to enter those countries without one but the law was changed in the aftermath of 9/11.The growth became even higher in 2017 when more than 21 million Americans possessed a valid passport. It had increased about 42 percent. I also labeled as an important one that the new passports issuance have also highly increased after 9/11 as all U.S. citizens needed officially a valid passport to travel by any means of transportation for any out-of country destination.

Lastly my last stacked bar chart shows a visual comparison between American domestic and international flights. The reason that I used here a bar chart is because it gives us useful takeaways and makes in visualization a significant move if the variables lead to a considerable divergence of prices. Travelling domestically became even more dominant for Americans lately.The chart reveals that in both of them the flights have proportionally increased between 2003 and 2017 except from the year of crisis with Lehman Brothers collapse. For International flights the percentage was about 4.75 percent in 2003 and it was increased over 5 percent in 2017. I ended up to perceive clearly that Americans started traveling internationally a lot. It seems that for different reasons either for holidays and leisure, business, education or others, Americans wish to travel all over the world. So all the claims that I have heard regarding that US is being far from everything or Americans do not travel abroad so often because they don’t prioritize an international travel, seem that were not valid any more considering my bar visualization.

The data set that I found for that chart from bureau of transportation statistics was really helpful to display completed and reliable results. There were also other inspiring charts with different variables for all annuals passengers in all U.S. Airlines flights that I could also include in my final project. Given the time constraints though I decided to limit my visualizations geographically for the time being. Moreover I have to report that I found more comprehensive to convert all the number of all passengers in percentage and label them so the user can understand with clarity the clear growth of the international flights.

In closing
I really wanted to dig in more than that as said before, and I needed to incorporate more of my technical steps that I was doing during this process of my project.Unfortunately did not have much time in this intensive course to reflect deeply and do a deep reading of the selections. I’m more than happy though to revisit them upon completions in this white paper when I do find a bit more free timeI need to mention that I really got inspired form some of the readings I have done before as Dear Data book. I found it very creative and also influential.

It really helped me to make a step back and think that Tableau in a fantastic software that creates excellent visualizations and that there is an opportunity to incorporate drawing and drafting into the planning and preparation of visualizations. I also was quiet inspired reading some chapters of the book Information Visualization: Perception for Design. Being a UX designer for several years I was familiar about making storyboarding, sketches, mockups, wire framing and prototypes .So when I was called to make a story telling in Tableau when I had to start drawing my first drafts using markers post its in order to finalize my visualizations I was so familiar with that and the same time so excited I had the chance to make something new having a strong background in that field of Design.
Moreover it was extra delightful for me the process and the discussion during our pin ups as storytelling visualizations in class gave us the option to improve our projects and look at it from another perspective the way that my classmates were approaching my stories. Finally I need to mention how I appreciated the whole set up of that intensive course. We developed much of our critical theory and practical tools and even tried to incorporate them immediately during the process of the course. I’m sure that this course will be a valuable tool for all DH students in GC. Our Instructor made a great job and she is willing to improve the course even more by adopting new methods and practices for the upcoming students. She promised she would learn a lot and warned that it would be intense, but four weeks later, I am proud to say that she held up both her promise and warning.