Wide Reach of Arts Funding in Maryland

DATA VISUALIZATION | INSTALLATION

This was a student project using data from the Maryland Council of the Arts, showing where arts funding ended up across the state. This is designed to be a 15 foot wide installation piece, displayed at the annual Maryland Arts Day gathering, where lawmakers, artists, and citizens meet and discuss their priorities for state arts funding.

Click on the image below to make full screen. Click again to zoom, and click and drag to pan around.

The infographic is structured around a sunburst chart, a type of radial hierarchical treemap (or it can be thought of as a bunch of nested pie charts). The central core shows the total arts funding for the year. The innermost ring divides that amount into the main regions of the state, breaking Baltimore City into it's own group, as it recieves the lions share of funding. Outward form there, it subdivides into counties. And then the next ring is a thicker, and color coded by arts discipline (music, dance, theater, etc.). Then each line radiated out to the edge of the canvas delineates grant recipients. The width of the arc encodes the grant amount. The edge of the canvas has an additional measure, showing the per capita arts funding amount for the county. As it's designed to be printed 15 feet across, it can be tough to read on the screen, so here are some detail shots:

I also designed a postcard, which would be displayed on a small table in front of the infographic. The postcard walks the viewer through how to read the infographic, and includes some summary statistics on the backside: