Project description:

In the past 20 years, housing price has continued to rise in Taiwan and it has become a serious problem. With this project, we hope to use open date from the Actual Price Registration System and family income information from the Ministry of Interior to show our readers the current housing situation.
We use scrollytelling to help readers to better understand the housing price of towns and cities in Taiwan, providing simulator at the end of the article for readers to calculate their affordability.

Impact reached:

We received plenty of positive feedback from readers. They are impressed by the innovative data visualization with spike map in this project.This method brings excellent reading experience a and makes it easy to understand the data.  This project also  aroused some voices on social media to advocate the government to implement a policy to curb housing prices.

Techniques/technologies used:

We mainly use “R” to analyze data, visualize them with “D3.js”, and use“front-end framework-Svelte to establish  the whole WebAppThe calculator of monetizing the house purchasing power is used with “Constant Amortization Mortgage Loan” and also references the medion of APR (Annual Percentage Rate) from multiple banks in Taiwan to estimate the results.

What was the hardest part of this project?

The challenge for this project is to find a better method to present the data. We usually use Choropleth map to illustrate this kind of data, but the disadvantage is that it may cause a certain degree of misleading to readers depending on the size of each block. After some trial and error, we believe that spike map can better present housing price data.

We combined data visualization with the characteristics of news application to improve reading experience, and allow readers to explore the data in the story to a certain extent, so that readers can better understand this topic and information.

What can others learn from this project?

Usually, this kind of topic is  reported with words only. BY using visualized data and innovative techniques, it can increase readers’ interests in this topic.

Although the current trend of digital storytelling is author-driven, we believe that giving readers space to explore data can definitely allow readers to understand the topic better.

With good stories and the above mentioned techniques, we can enhance the quality of the article and create a good project.

Project links:

www.thenewslens.com/interactive/144635