Makeover Monday, 2017 #27-30

I was on holiday for week 27 to 30 so caught up with these four later in the year… Week 27: Tourism in Berlin and Brandenburg For week 27 a makeover of a filled map showing visitor stats for Berlin and Brandenburg. I’ve retained the filled maps but focussed on an angle that interested me; whilst Berlin ranks top for both number of visitors and total number of nights in all years, when you look at average nights per visitor it is one of the regional districts that usually tops the list. Check out the interactive version here on Tableau Public where you can look at different years, and explore how the figures differ for domestic or international tourists. ...

August 3, 2017 · 3 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #26

It’s the half way point for Makeover Monday in 2017: 26 charts selected by Andy and Eva, 26 makeovers submitted and 26 blog posts written. It’s been a tough challenge for me to produce a visualisation every week and tougher still to write about each one. However, both of those aspects have been enjoyable, and the practice and reflection has really helped me get more out of Tableau in my job. I’ve had a few submissions selected in the weekly round up and one was selected in a #VizForSocialGood project for use by Inter American Development Bank. The way the Makeover Monday project works this year with the weekly wrap up lessons and the community input has made a huge difference to me. If you’re reading this, chances are you’ve helped me so thanks! ...

June 29, 2017 · 2 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #25

More Exasol-based data in Makeover Monday week 25. 200 Million+ ozone air quality readings from the EPA and a goal to make over a multi-year air quality tile plot on the EPA website. I spent way too much time exploring the data so only had time for a quick make over in the end and this short blog post. Checkout some of the other participants efforts on twitter or wait for Andy and Eva’s weekly summary to see some really cool visualisations. ...

June 22, 2017 · 1 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #24

Week 24 of Makeover Monday and a fascinating data set of art work in the Tate Collection. Nominally we’re making over charts from an article by Florian Kräutli such as this one: Thoughts on the original charts The chart highlighted to Makeover Monday participants was a pie chart showing the proportion of works in the collection by Turner versus all other artists. It works well to illustrate a key point about the data and explain why the author excluded Turner’s works from a number of their beautiful visualisations; when Turner’s works are included they skew the data to the point where other artists can’t be seen. The Tate Collection includes the Turner Bequest of roughly 30,000 works of art. Many of these art works are unfinished or preparatory sketches – e.g. each page in a sketch book is counted as a separate work. Angie Chen’s submission explains this nicely and is well worth checking out along with the original article. ...

June 14, 2017 · 4 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #23

Makeover Monday was live from TCOT in London this week and it was amazing to see some of the output produced in just one hour! The challenge was to redo an already great graph from FiveThirtyEight on US National Park popularity: Thoughts on the original chart I like the original chart – actually the whole article is really interesting and the charts engaged me throughout. The chart focussed on above shows the ranking nicely, but not the actual number of visitors over time. So we don’t know how much more popular Great Smoky Mountain has been than Rocky Mountain or Yosemite. It’s hard to follow some of the threads without interactivity – although the colour coding of some of them certainly helps. You also can’t tell which states the parks in question are located in. ...

June 9, 2017 · 4 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #22

Just a quick write up this week. Eva selected a map from Knoema showing what proportion of each country’s population had internet access. I quite like the interactive map, but it suffers from some problems common to filled maps. Eva and Andy have talked about the use of maps a few times in their weekly write ups so this week I thought I’d explore the issue in a bit more detail. ...

June 2, 2017 · 2 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #21

According to data released by Britain’s Office for National Statistics, and a recent BBC article, Brits drinking habits are changing. Are the British falling out of love with booze? The data and graphs involved were the topic for Makeover Monday this week. Thoughts on original charts The data set provided focussed on the first section and chart in the article. It’s a good simple bar chart clearly showing the changes in certain categories between 2005 and 2016. What we can’t see is the pattern in the intervening years. We also cannot see the parts that make up the whole in any given year; we can see the proportion drinking at least once during the week before the survey, and the proportion that do not drink at all, but there is no mention of those that drink but not during the week in question. Finally the response of drinking on 5 or more days of the week is presumably a subset of those drinking at least once during the week. The bar chart does not represent these sets fully. ...

May 25, 2017 · 4 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #20

For week 20 Makeover Monday is collaborating with #VizForSocialGood and Inter-American Development Bank to look at youth employment trends in Latin America and the Caribbean. Great data set, great cause and a great opportunity for our data visualisations to make a difference. For some reason I also felt an increased sense of responsibility to understand and accurately represent the data! ...

May 19, 2017 · 4 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #19

We’re redoing a list based on Dutch car registration data this week for #MakeoverMonday. The list doesn’t really do the data set justice, but I don’t speak Dutch so haven’t dug into the rest of the story! The actual figures were hard to reproduce and seemed like a niche part of the data, so I looked for a different story and decided to focus on the most popular makes of car. Headline figures give the reader some context as to how many registrations there were in 2015 and 2016, as well as the general growth rate. The slope chart then shows registrations for the top 5 makes and how these have changed: ...

May 10, 2017 · 1 min · Steve

Makeover Monday, 2017 #18

A look at Sydney ferry patronage for week 18 of Makeover Monday based on Transport for New South Wales Open Data. Thoughts on the original chart The chart being made over is actually a series of Tableau dashboards within a story (set of tabs). I like the way I can work through the story from an overview of the data to some summary charts and then down to some detail. The card type dashboard interested me. They key story that jumped out to me was that around 70% of trips were made using an Adult Opal Card. I don’t think we need to see this proportion visually per month and then again per line. Perhaps other angles from the data could have been visually represented too? Nice dashboard though and I enjoyed clicking through to the map for some context. ...

May 2, 2017 · 3 min · Steve