Methods

Color Scheme

This naturally being a project on avocados, the color scheme was fairly easy to create and work with. Originally, we wanted to use shades of green and light brown, much like an avocado itself, but visually this is a difficult color combination to pull off. While the green and brown look good together, the light green background obscured the dark green text and data. Realizing that we could create a larger contrast between the colors, while still maintaining the green/brown color scheme, was instrumental to helping us create a final color scheme reminiscent of the very topic we were looking into. In fact, it was this color scheme that led us to using the cartoon of an avocado in the GIF and in the video, as that cartoon had the colors we were looking for in our project.

Blood Guacamole?

Video

Understanding that not everyone likes to read online through paragraphs of text, we decided to use a video format as an innovative approach to our storytelling. After discussing as a group, we noted how important it was to take each topic one at a time, building on each other until we got to the analysis comparing avocado prices and cartel activity. The obvious first step was to look at the continued growth of avocado demand in the United States.

The method for this graph and other graphs are outlawed below, but a concern when utilizing a GIF in a video is the inability to have a GIF playing without having it move on before the topic is finished being discussed. As such, the PNGs used to create the GIF were downloaded and put on the screen with an overlay. This was the same process used for the sections on Avocado Production and cartel violence activity later in the video. The first PNG used was from 2015, the first year in our analysis. Later years were used to show the dramatic rise in Avocado Sales per Capita, drawing particular attention to Florida due to the clear rise in three separate cities. The video format also allowed for the clarification that 2020 data is difficult to compare due to the COVID-19 epidemic and its impact on trade and avocado consumption.

After the discussion on Avocado Sales Per Capita, the logical next step was to think about what the viewer’s next question would concern how the prices would change due to a rise in demand and consumption. As joked in the video, introductory economics classes teach that when demand increases, price should increase as well. The next graph, a faceted boxplot, is shown to illustrate the lack of dramatic price change.

With this in mind, we were able to lead the viewer to the next graph, detailing why we looked so closely at Mexico. To get the full screen effect, the background of the video was replaced by the graph and a video overlay was used to keep the narration present. This was difficult to do in Davinci Resolve, our video editor program of choice, so a professional videographer was contacted to assist with this particular edit.

Drawing the direct connection between cartel violence and the area of avocado production was much easier to do through video, as it allowed us to directly point the viewers attention to the overlap between the two.

The footage was shot on a Canon Ti7 and Davinci Resolve was used in order to edit the film and overlay the graphs (or the video). The avocado icon that appears throughout the video was placed both to keep the video interesting in the style of Saturday Night Live and also, due to combination of the camera settings, lighting, and mirror on the wall, reducing the exposure of the focused lighting.

Avocado Sales

Figure 1

For Figure 1: Yearly Hass Avocado Sales Per Capita In High Consumer Metropolitan Areas (2015-2021), we opted to use data from the Hass Avocado Board, since they have an expansive dataset regarding the location and number of purchases in selected regions. After removing smaller cities that were too close to larger cities and smaller cities with the same name as a larger city, we controlled for the population of each city by determining the demand per capita as opposed to just demand. Finally, we created frames/PNGs of the graph over several years, combining them into a GIF format. The avocado icon was used to further show that we were looking at avocado demand, the scale of which changed (one unit increase was associated with a square root increase in the radius to account for the circular nature of the avocado).

Price Change Over Time

Figure 2

For Figure 2: Avocado Price Change Over Time, data from the Hass Avocado Board was used once again. With a similar color scheme as outlined above, a boxplot was chosen because, as opposed to looking at the distribution of avocado prices that would call for a density plot, we were more interested in the change in median prices over time. Due to the natural significant figures within analysis of money, it made sense to place the median for each year slightly above the median to draw attention to the granular differences between each year. Outliers were put as a brown instead of a dark green to (1) draw differences between the outliers and the third quartile and (2) as a visual representation of them “being the (literally) pits,” not in line with the typical price of avocados in the United States.

Avocado Growth

Figure 3

For Figure 3: Avocado Growth, a similar color scheme was used as above; however, this time a dark brown was used for the graph to represent the avocado pits that must be placed in the ground in order for the avocados to grow. The design choice was intentional, as if the avocados were truly rising from the green ground, particularly in Mexico. Other colors and design decisions were chosen in line with previous graphs and approaches to show how drastically more avocados Mexico produces than any other country in the world.

Avocado Production

Figure 4

For Figure 4: Yearly Production of Avocados in Metric Tons by State, it was known going in from background research on the topic that the vast majority of avocado production was going to be in Michoacán. As such, it was critical that the lower bounds and the upper bounds of the continuous color scheme were drastically different and in line with our color scheme. The light green/dark green contrast worked well, especially when next to the light blue ocean on either side of Mexico. We added a time slider at the bottom to highlight how, from 2005 all the way through 2020, Michoacan is consistently the leader in avocado production.

Cartel Activity from the Avocado Trade

Figure 5

For Figure 5: Activity of Cartels Associated with Avocado Trade (2019-2022), we used a 5-level color scheme on top of the map of Mexico to highlight the four biggest cartels associated with the avocado trade. We also included an underlay outline of Michoacán to illustrate how cartels, particularly the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, operate within or around Michoacan. Even one of the largest cartels, La Familia Michoacán, has Michoacán in the name of the group, further underscoring how important the intersection of cartels and avocado production is.

Comparing Avocado Prices and Cartel Activity

Figure 6

For our final figure, Figure 6: Average U.S. Avocado Prices and Jalisco New Generation Cartel Actions Over Time, offered a different perspective from the geographical approach shown in previous figures. By looking at this temporally, the connections between cartel violence and avocado production can be seen over time, as opposed to just geographically without a clear time component. Using a combination of multiple sources of data, users can select a timeframe at the top of the window to “zoom in” on a particular set of data and compare that data along either a longer or a shorter time frame.

How have our visualization goals changed?

“War is a complex thing, and you’re going to have different realities from different perspectives. What you see depends on where you stand” - Steven Livingston

This quote from Professor Steven Livingston rings true when studying any conflict; at the end of the day, perspective is everything. With this in mind, this study has required a great deal of intention in shaping and maintaining our vision and scope of analysis. Our initial goal was simple - unpack the connection between cartel violence and the avocado trade. This is a story that has recently garnered the attention of US-based media outlets, but this story is far from played out. Even now the situation in Mexico continues to evolve in response to shifting market demands, the presence of different cartels, and the response of the farmers that form the very heart of Mexico’s agricultural sector.

The evolution of our vision could be summed up in a single word - specificity. The initial proposal painted a picture of the investigation of widespread changes, proposing that we “provide an easily interpretable resource for individuals to understand the connection between legitimate agricultural trade and incidents of cartel violence.” This is a sweeping proposal, and one that focuses more on a vision than on any actual implementation. The work conducted since has been focused on grounding this vision in reality, taking into account limitations in data, the incorporating of narrative elements, and technical considerations.

Along this journey we quickly realized that it was not enough to simply tie together violence and agricultural production. This story required significant background to understand its importance on the global stage, educating the viewer about how the demand signal has evolved in the U.S. over time, how demand is connected to price fluctuations, and which countries produce and export the most avocados. It is only through the incorporation of these elements that this story makes any sense and has any larger significance. This, then, was a significant turning point in both our vision and visualization strategy. From the perspective of vision, we realized the importance of painting a broader picture in our narrative, connecting all the pieces of background mentioned before. This evolution naturally informed our visualization goals, as this change in vision required the creation and incorporation of several additional visualizations to match this change in vision.

Despite these changes, the core of our narrative remained stable, unified through the creation of our innovative view - a guided video tour of this story. The goal of this video would be to walk the viewer through this project, narrating key elements of the story, and guiding the interpretation of the visualizations we created. This narration would also present a small step towards creating a product that is accessible, when viewed through the lens of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). These guidelines help ensure the creation of web content that is accessible to people with disabilities. One key pillar of these guidelines is the incorporation of captions on all videos, a practice that should be “provided for all prerecorded audio content in synchronized media.” By hosting our innovative view on YouTube we are also able to take advantage of their video captioning capabilities, presenting a solution that follows this aspect of the WCAG guidelines, and helping deliver a solution to ensure broad accessibility.

Besides these high level changes, granular changes were also made to each of the individual visualizations included in the final narrative. The first visualization, Avocado Sales, was initially visualized as a proportional symbol map to understand differences in demand between different states. Over the course of this project, this static map product was iteratively expanded upon until the final map product was delivered in the form of a GIF. The symbols themselves were also changed too, to better fit the theme of this project. Rather than using proportional symbols as was initially proposed, we were able to employ an avocado emoji to enhance the relevance of the shape choice used. From a data perspective this visualization was also updated to focus solely on high consumer metropolitan areas, rather than every single state. This enables us to highlight key hubs in the U.S. for avocado demand, resulting in a more focused visualization.

The second planned visualization, Price change Over Time, was a boxplot of avocado prices by year in the United States, to explore how prices have evolved in response to cartel influence. Our final design is relatively true to the initial design, bearing the same form. However, significant time was spent tweaking the colors of the visualization itself to match the overall theme of the presentation. From a data perspective there were several sources of data that could be used for this visualization. To ensure that our analysis is as focused and specific as possible for this visualization we decided to remove organic avocados from the equation. Our initial design plan didn’t incorporate subsetting by type of avocado, so this was definitely a change to our final product that was not initially envisioned in our design document.

The third planned visualization was designed to help the user “gain insight into where avocados are harvested and prepared for export.” After understanding that demand for this crop is increasing, moving to an assessment of key avocado exporters globally helps us bridge the gap to why we’re focusing on Mexico. With this in mind, the third visualization, Avocado Production by Location, gives viewers this information to take that next step in the narrative. By using a bar chart we’re able to quickly arm the viewer with an understanding of the clear disparity in avocado exports - Mexico is by far the global leader in this sector. Although more data was available, we evolved this visualization to only focus on the top several exporters, to ensure that the message of this visualization was clear. The design choices made in this visualization also evolved over time, as time was again spent ensuring that any design decisions made for this visualization were mirrored in our other visualizations.

Our fourth visualization, Yearly Production of Avocados in Metric Tons by State, was initially not planned in our initial proposal. Its creation resulted from our group reflecting on the material we had, the story we were attempting to tell, and the gaps that presented themselves. It was felt that there needed to be a bridge between understanding the key exporters of avocados and getting into cartel violence. In this regard, the addition of this visualization is a major change to the technical vision of this project, as it was initially not included in our scope of work. Adding this visualization ensured that the narrative flowed smoothly, without any gaps for the viewer. With this in mind, the visualization goals for this product were to present production data on a more granular level, delivering a state-level product of Mexican avocado production. By color-coding states by their production, the viewer is able to rapidly understand where the prime growing regions are, and therefore the areas most susceptible to cartel influence.

The previous visualizations all covered aspects of legitimate avocado trade and production, but what was missing was the tie to cartel violence. Visualization five, titled Reported Activity of Cartels Associated with Avocado Trade, provided a geospatial approach to “showing aggregate violence committed by cartels over a given time period.” The design decisions created in our initial proposal have lasted through to the final product, but what has evolved is our understanding of the nuances of cartel influence and control in Mexico. Although there are many cartels operating in Mexico, and all have ties to illicit activities, identifying the cartels most involved in the avocado industry required extensive research and refinement. The end goal was to show the viewer the complicated and intertwined connection between these organizations, while not overwhelming the viewer with 15 or 20 separate groups. By focusing on major players in this area, our final product attempts to reflect the reality of cartel control in Mexico, without cluttering the map product.

To augment the geospatial information about cartel violence delivered in the previous visualization, we also wanted to engage viewers to explore the data on their own. By creating a highly interactive time series-based approach to looking at our topic as a whole, users can explore interesting patterns in avocado prices, cartel violence, and cartel-caused fatalities over the last several years.