It’s the second day of the dashboard week here at the Data School Down Under, and 3 more days to go. Today we were challenged to create a visualization using the Olympics data set.
Round 1
Coaches advice was first to think of the story we would like to tell and the way we could enrich the data, and afterwards go ahead and explore it.
I took the advice and decided to go with something that I am familiar with: Judo. I did judo for a couple of years back in high school and I got intrigued by the insights I could find.
Judo is not only a sport, there is a whole philosophy behind it. In Japanese Judo means the “Gentle Way” and it’s based on using the opponent’s strength against them, without hurting them. People doing Judo (Judokas) are known to be calm, kind and patient. I wondered if the world happiness data could show some correlation. Are athletes doing Judo happier or more generous than therest? Looks like no. After plotting some scatter plots while exploring the data, I came to the conclusion that there was no correlation at all.
Round 2
Even though I was disappointed that there was no correlation between Judokas and the happiness level, I thought of another idea. I wanted to find out how persistent are Judokas, how many times they come back to the Olympics, and how many times they win a medal.
As it was past 2 pm and I was running out of time, I decided to give myself one hour to see what I can come up with. This was the result:
Even though it looks nice if you want to do a deep analysis and to examine each athlete one by one, but I don’t think most people would be interested to do that. It was time to abort this plan as well.
Round 3
Round 3 and the last one, if I lose this round, I lose the fight, something I wasn’t ready to accept. I had to come up with a new plan very fast.
As Judo is a sport that became part of the Olympics in 1964 and I was a little bit limited on the data, I decided to broaden my filter. Why not look at all the martial arts?
I decided to show the number of participants in martial arts per country with a viz in the tooltip showing gender participation. Then the top 10 medalist countries through time using a race bar chart (Russia seems to be very good at fighting). And last the number of Judokas through time (Judo gained many participants in a short time).
Click in the screenshot to view the viz in Tableau Public.
The message of the day
Today I felt on my skin that not every experiment is going to be a successful one. Actually, probably most of them are not going to be successful. The important thing is not to give up and try other things until you come up with an outcome.
Looking forward to seeing what is going to be the lesson tomorrow.
