Lab 2 Writeup
Tucker Craig
09/12/2017

1. What is the difference between d3.scaleTime(), d3.scaleLinear(), and d3.scaleOrdinal()? Specifically, discuss the different types of data that you would use for each, and provide an example data set for each.

d3.scaleTime(): with date objects as domain it outputs a discrete range.

d3.scaleLinear(): with "a continuous domain, such as the set of real numbers, or dates" it outputs a discrete range.

d3.scaleOrdinal(): with "a discrete domain, such as a set of names or categories" it outputs a discrete range.

(https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29785238/d3-different-between-scale-in-ordinal-and-linear/)

2. What specific information can you gather from this visualization, i.e. what did it teach you about West Nile Virus?

Within the United States, between 2007 and 2017, there have been seasonal spikes of West Nile Virus cases. This leads me to believe that the disease is transmitted seasonally (the data spikes at a similar time during each year) or that the infected cell can only survive during certain times of the year.

3. What are two deficiencies of this visualization? Give one possible design improvement for each deficiency.

One issue is that the lines from the graph are overlapping. A good solution for this is to make a legend (like what I've created in the past) or a menu which would highlight a specific county, making the others' opacities 0. The viz is also too clustered to be differentiated around the x axis. One might add a zoom feature which would be able to expand a certain region.