Top Dataviz of April 2022 — Visualizing Air Raid Sirens in Ukraine
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This month, our Trending Notebook Bot saw huge engagement with Volodymyr Agafonkin ‘s notebook Visualizing Air Raid Sirens in Ukraine. It’s the biggest hit of the year so far.
Engagement, Impressions, Likes and Retweets
The notebook went viral on Twitter from Volodymyr’s own tweet. This went viral because it provides a unique angle to a story people are interested in. Volodymyr collected the data with a bot scraping for regional Telegram air raid alerts. The DataViz makes an emotional connection to the viewer — seeing those alerts visualized gives makes the reader anxious and empathetic to the suffering of those who a receiving those alerts for real. In a sense, the data provide insights into the anxiety level of Ukrainian citizens as this terrible war unfolds.
As with everything on Observable, you have permission to remix the visualization, the data is embedded in the notebook and you can fork it. Perhaps you think the data could be visualized in another way, maybe you could create the next viral hit?
See you next month! Here are all the trending notebooks of April in their own words.
Visualizing Air Raid Sirens in Ukraine by @mourner
As Ukraine continues to heroically resist Russia’s invasion, Ukrainians have to face new realities of war. One of them, a constant presence in our daily lives, is Air Raid Sirens — a loud sound indicating the threat of imminent attack from the air and a call to take shelter immediately. In the digital age, instead of loudspeakers, most people rely on mobile apps like Air Alert, which allows you to choose a region and get emergency alerts for it. It also has a Telegram channel which doubles the alerts.
