Something’s Fishy: A story about Fishing Throughout the Globe by The Fisherman and his Fish
Project Summary.
The Global Fishing Watch updates data every year about many attributes of fishing that occur around the world. Their main goal of this is to “share knowledge about human activity at sea to enable fair and sustainable use of our ocean.” While this is a great way for humans to be mindful of the fishing that is happening, there is no way to see this data on the website of the Global Fishing Watch. This is where we step in. We take some general data from the website and create insightful visualizations for anyone to use. By doing this, we cut out the potentially confusing steps to make your own graphs in R using the same dataset. Please enjoy the graphs and visualizations that we have made to have a better understanding of the fishing that occurs around the globe.
End Product.
This project is about providing clear graphs and visualizations for those who might not have the capabilities of designing them themselves.
Our main audience is one who would like to find out how our seas are being fished. This person is one who cares about the project but is not very technologically advanced to create these graphs themselves.
Our app clearly shows the amount of fishing that has happened over 2020. The users can see the countries that do the most amount of fishing, as well as where this fishing is taking place.
The fun parts of our app are the map that shows where exactly the fishing is taking place. Another fun piece is the cartogram of the world. A cartogram is a distorted map that increases the size of the country based on the amount of fishing that they have done.
Describe your process, results, challenges, and achievements. It was a rough process. We had a lot of work to do with the data and it took a while to figure out how to even start with our dataset. We had to clean the data well and get it to a workable size. After that, we were able to start on our visualizations. Our visualizations were really rewarding because they took us forever to figure out. However, we were not done yet. We had to finish the Shiny app and make it look nice. While it was not difficult to do so, it was difficult to make it exactly how we wanted. It was a fun time with even better people.
