Tsimane Oral Health Heatmap: A Data Visualization Project

This repository showcases a data visualization project designed to represent the complete oral health status of the Tsimane population of Bolivia. The heatmap synthesizes over 32,000 data points from 1,176 individuals into a single, intuitive image, revealing complex patterns of dental health across age, sex, and anatomy.

This is a small GitHub Pages static site. The repo currently publishes one primary page (index.md) and one primary visualization asset (oral-health-heatmap.png).

The repo also pins a local GitHub Pages build path (Gemfile and .ruby-version) and keeps the committed source figure (Figure2-Teeth_v4.1.pdf) with a rebuild script in scripts/render_heatmap.py.

For the branch/PR/QA loop used by future agents, see docs/agentic-first-buildout-plan.md.

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▶️ View the Live Project

The full project, including the visualization and detailed analysis, is best viewed on the live project page:

https://mschwar.github.io/data-visualization/

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About the Visualization

The heatmap displays the dental health of 1,176 individuals (543 men and 633 women) from the Tsimane Health and Life History Project. Its purpose is to make a complex, multidimensional dataset immediately understandable by visualizing patterns of tooth decay and loss across:

• 28 permanent teeth (incisors, canines, premolars, and molars)
• Age groups (ranging from 15-24 to 75+)
• Sex (male and female)
• Anatomy (upper and lower teeth)

A 5-point color scale indicates the health status of each tooth, from healthy (blue) to missing (red).

Repository Contents

• index.md: The main content file for the GitHub Pages site, written in Markdown.
• oral-health-heatmap.png: The high-resolution image of the data visualization.
• _config.yml: The configuration file that applies the visual theme to the GitHub Pages site.
• Figure2-Teeth_v4.1.pdf: The committed source figure used to regenerate the PNG.
• Gemfile: The pinned GitHub Pages and Ruby toolchain.
• .ruby-version: The pinned Ruby runtime for local builds.
• scripts/validate_repo.py: Lightweight repository validation for future contributors and agents.
• docs/agentic-first-buildout-plan.md: Branch/PR/QA loop and feature sequencing guide.
• scripts/render_heatmap.py: Rebuild script for the published heatmap PNG.
• scripts/check_homepage.py: Smoke test for the rendered homepage HTML.
• docs/heatmap-provenance.md: Source artifact and rebuild notes.

Validate The Repo

Run:

python scripts/validate_repo.py
python scripts/check_homepage.py

This checks for required files, obvious broken local references, key site metadata, committed OS junk files, and the rendered homepage shape.

Rebuild Locally

This repository pins Ruby 3.3.4 and github-pages 232, matching the current GitHub Pages dependency set. To rebuild the site and the heatmap locally:

bundle install
bundle exec jekyll build
bundle exec jekyll serve --baseurl=""
python scripts/render_heatmap.py

The heatmap PNG is regenerated from Figure2-Teeth_v4.1.pdf at 200 DPI. The rendered pixels match the published PNG; only PNG encoder metadata can differ.

Publication Context

This visualization was created as part of the research published in:

Trumble, B., Schwartz, M., et al. (2024). Poor Oral Health Is Associated With Inflammation, Aortic Valve Calcification, and Brain Volume Among Forager-Farmers. The Journals of Gerontology. DOI: 10.1093/gerona/glae013

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Created by Matthew Schwartz.