The Making of “The Business of Arresting Time”
By: Elizabeth Estefan
Tags: Infographics, Data Visualisation

The Making of “The Business of Arresting Time”

Arrest. Noun, “a stoppage or sudden cessation of motion.” Verb, “seize (someone) by legal authority and take into custody.” Time. Noun, “the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole.” Verb, “measure the time taken by (a process or activity, or a person doing it).” — Definitions by Oxford Languages.

Project 1 Final Print Design (11 x 17) — Created using Adobe Illustrator and Flourish

The Assignment, the Story

In my grad school class “Introduction to Info Graphics and Data Visualization,” Prof. Alberto Cairo tasked us with visualizing a story based on the theme of mass incarceration in the US. The assignment entailed reading The New Yorker article “The Caging of America” by Adam Gopnik, January 23, 2012, to help us find an avenue for the story.

Though the article provided many possible stories, I was immediately impressed by the opening, painting the inmates’ relationship with time as a daunting source of despair. And after reading through the full article, I kept going back to time.

For many of us, it sometimes feels as if there is not enough time. There is anxiety and fear of the ever rapidly, wrinkling time and the need for more months in a year, more days in a week and more hours in a day.

For the inmates as expressed in the article, it is painted quite the opposite and to a depth of feeling difficult to fathom—time as a seemingly never ending, torturous expansive entity. Envision the years, months, mornings, afternoons, evenings, nights, hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds to infinity.

The story is time.

The Data

There can be a lot of stories in a single dataset, so many that I found myself a little overwhelmed by all the possibilities. To help with the challenge, I chose to narrowed my focus to Florida arrests. I ultimately compiled datasets from several to obtain information from various years across counties. Data sources include Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Crime in Florida, Annual 1989, 1999, 2009 and 2019 Florida uniform crime reports [Computer program]. Tallahassee, FL: FDLE; Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Total UCR Arrests for Florida by Jurisdiction, Offense Type, and Race, 2019; and Vera, Incarceration Trends.

The Proposal

I made my proposal of time and the charts I planned to use to show the volume of arrests over time and volume of time that equated. I proposed the following charts.

A very rough sketch of proposed charts before drawing the proposal sketch in Adobe Illustrator.

Slopegraph to compare change over time. Increasing volume of arrests by county 1970 vs 2018/2019. Encoding: line weight and color hue.

to compare change over time. Increasing volume of arrests by county 1970 vs 2018/2019. Encoding: line weight and color hue. Choropleth Map of Florida arrest rates vs population by county to show volume, 2019. Encoding: color hue.

of Florida arrest rates vs population by county to show volume, 2019. Encoding: color hue. Stacked Bar Graph to show arrest comparisons between South Florida counties (Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties) 1989, 1999, 2009, 2019. Encoding: Bar thickness, length and color hue.

to show arrest comparisons between South Florida counties (Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties) 1989, 1999, 2009, 2019. Encoding: Bar thickness, length and color hue. Exact Values to show grandness of time. Total number of arrests in one day multiplied by 24 hours and total number of years, months, weeks days, hours, minutes and seconds it equates.

Design Drafts and Critiques

For the assignment, we were tasked to create both a print Info Graphic 11" x 17" and a companion mobile version.

For the proposal design draft, I spent quite a lot of time creating my sketch in Illustrator to show as closely as possible my intended layout. I wanted to provide approximate proportion and placement and be as detailed as possible. This proved to be helpful with the following draft versions.