Visualizing Data
Data visualization helps tell a story by curating data into a form that is more easier to understand and more readily accessible. As a big baseball fan, I used this exercise to create a visual to represent the uptick in baseball card sales.
What I learned from my research is that over the course of the 2020 quarantine, there has been a significant increase in baseball card sales. Experts attribute lockdown combined with stimulus checks, on top of record high unemployment rates, as to why there has been a renewed interest in buying and trading baseball cards.
I mostly focused on the section of public sales records Topps Co. put out around 2007. The story I tell with this visual data is the volatility of this market. It’s all based on what is happening culturally at the time, and the scarcity of the product. The buy and resell, the supply and demand – a lot of it is dictated by trends. Sales usually stay in an average range but phenomena like popular card games or new forms of virtual currency cause sales to spike erratically. I feel I even manipulated the data a bit in my visualization because, even though 2000 and 2005 show an increase in sales in my graphic, the 2020 increase is significantly bigger. I thought making it such an obviously bigger pile would drive home how crazy this spike is.