The subject of my data table related to comics is male comic artists that are African Americans with citizenship in the United States. This topic is very significant because it is telling us all of the African American comic artists that are currently represented on Wikidata. This also has a lot of significance towards what the data is not showing us. The data shows that there are only 17 African American comic artists that are represented on this data website. It is showing the lack of African Americans within this occupation, but if you were to only change the ethnic group from African American to white Americans then there would be much more data that is shown. I chose to use a data table to be the representation of my data because it is very simple to read and interpret. The table provides a very organized set of data which means that most people who see it should be able to understand what the table is showing. The data table also provides a description of what exact occupation each individual comic artist has. This provides a bit more involvement with the person seeing the graph because it provides some context to the data set. Through this process of using Wikidata I learned that there really is not that much information about many comic artists. I felt like as I was attempting to create this visualization I had to be very exact in what I was trying to incorporate into the data set because there was very little information for certain African American cartoon artists. If I attempted to incorporate more forms of data for these artists then most of them would not continue to show up on the data set because of the lack of information about them, even if it were true to all of the artists. With more time I would have liked to attempt to compare the amount of data from white comic artists with African American comic artists to see how much more information and data would be presented
I included the country of citizenship into this data set because I wanted to make sure to only include black American comics artists. I understand that the term African American already implies that people who identify as such are most likely citizens of the United States. I wanted to see if the data set changed at all with the amount of people if I incorporated the country of citizenship, so I could see if there was any error in Wikidata itself. It is important to note that there was no change in the data, so Wikidata was correct to the extent of including the 17 African American comics that it provided information for being citizens of the United States as well. Another important thing to note is that the query only pulls up 17 comic artists, and there are most definitely more than 17 African American male comic artists that hold citizenship in the United States. This means that there is work to be done on researching many other African American comic artists. There is no data inputed into Wikidata for many of them, so it brings up the question of if researchers and the Wikidata community are unaware of these creators, or if they don’t think these artists are worth mentioning. In order to make my query more reliable and accurate, we must first do research and input all of the artists who fit the query into Wikidata. This would be a digital humanities style project because we would use our resources and technology to achieve a more accurate representation of the comics community. Looking specifically at the “Ethnic Group” category could potentially be problematic. This is because if someone accidentally misapplies someone to an ethnic group that does not match how they identify, it could lead to misrepresentation as a person, and also within the data sets that they could be applied to.