This is for Maple

Visualising the career of a musician-turned rescue dog

Yaning Wu
2 min readJun 18, 2021

Please note: this article mentions bereavement.

I’ve spent a lot of time doing research and frantic data cleaning on topics that impact millions of people (with varying levels of success). But sometimes, I read something, get emotional, and dive straight into a deeply personal data viz journey. This is one of those times — please continue scrolling.

Accessibility

Please find here a document containing all the relevant text in the graphics above, and please visit this link to access the data I used in my visualisation.

Notes on process and methodology

The type of visualisation I tried today was inspired by Italian designers Federica Fragapane and Giorgia Lupi, who can make any sketch look stunning. I took on Giorgia’s data humanism approach and Federica’s symbol-oriented style to create something that I hope can show trends while communicating the richness of my subjects’ experiences. Please let me know how I can improve in this regard!

Maple, the rescue dog described above, stares lovingly at the camera while clutching in her lap a stuffed elephant with a red and yellow hat.

Thank you so much for reading. Here’s a video that Acoustic Trench just released — if you were moved by this piece, you should know that his content is far more beautiful than I can describe.

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Yaning Wu
Yaning Wu

Written by Yaning Wu

she/her. Population Health student @ UCL. Perpetual dataviz nerd. Published on Towards Data Science and UX Collective.

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