Tag Archives: little big data

Little Big Data Documentation

I checked off “Become an organ donor” easily when recently getting my state identification card. This made me wonder how many people actually become organ donors and why there aren’t more. According to the New York Times, 95 percent of Americans support organ donations but less than 40 percent are actually donors, 23 percent of people fear they are not healthy enough or are too old to donate their organs, 50 percent of respondents are concerned that doctors will not try as hard to save them if they are known to be an organ donor, 44 percent believe there is a black market in which people can buy or sell organs or tissue, and 57 percent question whether or not a person can recover from brain death (source). It baffles me why anybody would not donate their organs after death when they won’t need them.

This chart shows the trend of donations from 1988–2013 in the states. It only shows donations from donors who have died and which organs were procured (kidney, liver, pancreas, lung, heart, and intestine). Some interesting things that I have noticed is that in some states the amount of donations actually decreases, and in other states there are dramatic jumps in donations. It’s also interesting that in 1988, America has an estimated population of 244.5 million people and in 2013 they had 316 million people. Meanwhile, some states have seen less than a 50 person increase in donations over the last 26 years.

DSC_0002

DSC_0003

DSC_0004

DSC_0008

DSC_0007

The coding was not difficult, just tedious. In the code, I directly inputted the data because it only took me a few seconds to copy and paste the table from the OPTN site. A snafu I encountered was that all the visualizations were too big to fit on my Processing screen so I had to wait until I opened the PDF to see if there were any visualization errors.

It is important for people to see how many people are actually donating. Instead of thinking “If I don’t donate at least someone else will” the viewer should be thinking about donating themselves. This poster could be put up in hospitals, donation centers, and if I had my way, DMVs. If I had more time on it I would research more on the deaths of the people on the waiting list.

Code: Organs Visualization

PDF: Donor Types

Little Big Data POCs

Find an effective way to extract the data.

First, I needed to get my data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network which was in the form of HTML tables with no link to click on to get the data a .CSV or .XML. I did, however find this site, Convert CSV, that converted HTML tables into CSV files. It has the option of entering in an URL but the link to the data didn’t work because it was interactive. Instead, I downloaded the HTML code of the site when it loaded the data I wanted used the option of uploading HTML files to the Convert CSV site and chose the table I wanted to convert. It worked but all the labels were missing (years and organ donated). That isn’t a problem when entering the programming stage because all I need are the numbers and I can just add the labels myself. It works way better than transferring the data by hand myself.

Importing and plotting the data.

Second, I need to visual the data. In my comp I used stacked bar graphs to do this. I took the code used in class and tweaked it to fit my data. I had to change all the floats to ints and make sure my arrays were not out of bounds (which kept popping up as an error until I fixed it.) Also, after looking at the stacked bars, I am debating on whether or not it should be a stacked bar graph or just separate bar graphs.

Screen Shot 2014-10-13 at 6.18.42 PM

Code: POC

Get the visualization into Illustrator to tweak.

The only problem I had was that at first illustrator was unable to read the file. Which was weird because it clearly said it was a PDF. Then I went back into the code and realized I forgot to add endRecord(); at the end of the code.

region1

Little Big Data Proposal

The purpose of my poster will be to inform viewers about the benefits of becoming an organ donor. When I got my state identification, I had no question about whether or not I wanted to become an organ donor. At this current time, there are over one hundred thousand people on the list waiting for a new organ and, on average, eighteen people a day die from waiting (American Transplant Foundation). There are some misconceptions about what happens when someone becomes an organ donor such as people thinking the doctors would not work as hard to save an organ donor’s life. This poster can hopefully show that all the amount of organs and how much help (and how much more help is needed) organ donors provide.

The data that will be used in my poster is located on the U.S Department of Health and Human  Services website and was collected by UNet, created by the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), which is an “online database system for the collection, storage, analysis, and publication of all OPTN data pertaining to the patient waiting list, organ matching, and transplants.” It everything one might need to know about the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN). It has national, state, and regional data that consists of filters such as donor type, donor age, donor ethnicity, donor gender, donor by death, etc, from as far back as 1988 to the present (it is constantly being updated to the minute). It also has transplant data, the waiting list, waiting time, and percent transplanted. I specifically need data only about donors and transplants, as well as waiting time and deaths. The U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services already has an infographic from a couple of years ago but I plan to go more in-depth than it does. OPTN Data.

organ-donation-infographic

It might be a problem to export all the data because it’s interactive data that I can change based on the filters I have chosen but I DO have access to the data. So a step in production will be to find a way to get the data in friendly format. I will use Processing and Illustrator as my main tools to create the visualization. These programs are located on my computer and it will be printed at school.

organ donations

PDF: Organ Donations Comp