Description

Chicken, Eh?, 2020

The data of the ever-growing poultry industry in Canada has been collected and recorded annually by the Government of Canada (link here) since 1941. Inspired by the themes of production demand and consumption in Xiaowei Wang's Blockchain Chicken Farm, I wanted to visualize this data set and translate average value and weight of chicken by year. This project hopefully allows the viewer to glean interesting nuggets (bad pun!) of data relating to chicken size (in kg) and value (in $ CAD) over the years.

Design Process

I wasn’t able to find an active API (beyond the metadata API) for this data set, but the Statistics Canada website had very robust (and customizable) .csv files of data. I converted this into JSON and used this information to isolate parameters (ie. total chickens produced by poultry industry/year, total weight, and total value). I was interested in having the user input a year into the sketch, producing data outputs in text form but also as a means of visualizing the change in weight and value through the chicken image. With map() the chicken’s width changes in relation to the average weight in the inputted year. The chicken’s height changes in relation to the average dollar value in the inputted year.

Click here to view the code.

Reflection

This project was interesting. It expands on the interests I have in my practice around shining light on narratives that steer the focus away from humans. In ways, this concept is a reflection on human behavior and consumption patterns. I’m not sure if it fully responds to the principles of feminist data, but I do think it recontextualizes the rigid and quantitative data supplied by the government. Thank you to Olivier Brückner for your tutor help.