Translative Device

Description

API source

My Project 10 is visualizing the superheroes from all comic universes. Superheroes played an important role in my childhood memories because I grew up watching different superhero stories from comic books, animations, and movies. They have always been the representatives of justice that fight against evilness. After the release of the first female-led superhero film Wonder Woman from DC Universe, I realized the imbalanced gender distribution in superhero worlds that the female characters were much less than the male characters. I tried to look at the gender ratio by adding the gender information into the circle representing the specific superhero. From the outcome, it is obvious that “male” is most of the gender information in the circles.

Design Process

My initial concept for the project was visualizing the film dialogue distribution by gender or race to bring out the sexism and racism in movies. I chose to reference the femnist data Principle #2, challengiing unequal power structures. But I had a hard time finding the appororiate API source collecting the film dialogues.

When I was looking for the movie datasets, I saw Marvel movies and decided to change my direction to the superhero universe. I found out the Superhero API and dataset collecting almost all the superhero information from the comics. In the p5 sketch, each circle with a shining edge represents one specific superhero in the universe. The positions are set due to the heroes’ weight and height values. The dense area indicates that most of the heroes have no huge differences in weight and height statistics. After adding the gender information, A great disparity in gender distribution appears because the circles representing male characters were much more than circles representing female characters. I decided to put the picture of the female superhero Blink as the background to form a contrast.

Reflection

This project was challenging for me. I spent a long time looking for appropriate API sources and applied the data into the p5js sketch. Since almost all the information is pulled out from the API source and the database, every step of the coding is connected. One mistake may break all the work. But I did learn a lot about API and data visualization from the whole learning process. The feminist data principle I chose to reference is the second principle of “challenging unequal power structure and working toward justice.” The unequal gender distribution of superheroes brings out the male leading and dominating structure. Although nowadays we are trying to emphasize the female power and challenge the structure, there’s still a long way to go. Overall, I think the project and the data from Superhero API suit the principle.