My project for course: Analog Data Visualization for Storytelling

At the start of the course I thought for a bit on what aspect I could easily and quickly collect a decent data set for. I decided that it would be really interesting to look at the books that I have read over the various periods of my life. I started by exporting the library data from my good reads and story graph accounts. This gave me an excessing amount of data types so I knew that I needed to narrow the focus.
I decided on collecting the following data points:
*Book title
*Authors
*Genre
*Number of pages
*Format
*Stand alone or part of a series, and
*Year read

Before starting analysis, I had an idea of what trends the data would produce, but I was surprised by a few of the genres. I knew that historical fiction would be have the highest reading count by far, but I didn't realise it would be such a large difference. I was also surprised by the number of romance and paranormal books I had read.

After looking at some inspiration on Pinterest I decided that I wanted to try to represent the data as a book shelf and I knew I wanted to have a go at watercolor. Each genre was allocated a different colour and spine pattern. The size of the book represented the size of the individual books and if there was a visible book mark it represented that the book was part of a series.