stateDepDataVis

Description

In the past 200 years, the United States has reached out to over 150 countries, establishing new relations with close to every single one. To help others explore and understand the time and efforts taken to establish diplomatic relations with so many countries, we created a visual representation of the growth through tracking the embassies established by each year.

Problems we faced

• The most difficult part of this endeavor was collecting data from the Department of State website to a format that could be utilized by our program. The main problems we faced while scraping the website included inconsistent formatting and discrepancies in URL naming.
• A difficulty we faced in the development of the website was the displaying of embassies on the map. Google Maps API, though comprehensive, took some time to learn and implement. In addition, because there were no easily-found offline maps APIs, we were unable to implement our program in a completely isolated manner. This means that in the event that a system running our app loses connection to the internet, our program will fail.

Future Improvements

• We plan on adding a timelapse feature that allows the user to view rapidly view all the years in a short period of time.
• We would also like to allow the user to view embassies created since the last selected year, to allow greater comprehension of the data.

Built With

• css
• html
• javascript
• python