Visualizing U.S. Animal Shelter Outcomes

This paper introduces the ShelterViz web app, an interactive visualization platform developed to make U.S. animal shelter and rescue data accessible and easy to explore. Using a dataset provided by the nonprofit organization Shelter Animals Count, the ShelterViz project allows users to manipulate mo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNorth Carolina libraries Vol. 78; no. 1; p. 34
Main Author Dolling, Carmen S
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Raleigh North Carolina Libraries, Media and Technology 01.04.2020
Subjects
Animal shelters
Usability testing
Visualization
Web sites
United States > US
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Summary:This paper introduces the ShelterViz web app, an interactive visualization platform developed to make U.S. animal shelter and rescue data accessible and easy to explore. Using a dataset provided by the nonprofit organization Shelter Animals Count, the ShelterViz project allows users to manipulate more than 100 different intake and outcome statistics collected from over 4,000 shelters and rescues across the United States. This research project employed a design-study methodology as well as approaches grounded in visual analytics and user-centered design. The website was developed using HTML5, CSS, Javascript, and D3.js. The results of the usability testing indicate support for the project and its potential to help shelter and rescue organizations to better understand the impacts of various factors on animal outcomes, recognize trends in their data over time, and ultimately take steps to improve animal welfare. A demo version of the website can be accessed at https:// www.shelterviz.com.
ISSN:0029-2540