Day 3 of dashboarding week!
The Brief
Sweet dataset to work with today since it’s full of analysis and storytelling potential. Craig gave us the Global Terrorism Database to find insight and tell a story with.
Data Prep
Data prep was pretty straightforward today. Year 1993 was missing so we had to union in the data. From there it was reading a 65 page document to find out what each field and fact meant and how to shape the data to become Tableau friendly. I did most of the prep on Alteryx since it was pretty straight forward.
The idea/challenges
I previously read a book about narcotics that compared drug cartels to multinational companies and used business/operation terminologies (e.g. supply and demand) to explain how cartels were.successful. That book made me realise if we looked at the world from a different perspective, it could bring forth a whole new understanding. Taking a look at the dataset, oneof the first questions that popped into my mind was “What misunderstanding do we have about terrorism?” and “What different lens could we view terrorism with to enrich our understanding”?
I initiatlly wanted to scrape Google Trends and Twitter data to see how the world and online communities have responded to terrorism (e.g. Pray for) and to calculate the virtual reach of each incident and digital penetration near incident locations. It would definitely be fascinating to view terrorism from a marketing lens! However, it turns out Twitter API takes at least 3 business days for applications to be approved and Google Trends data only goes back to 2004 so I decided that could be a personal project for another time.
In the end, I chose to look at terrorism from a marketing terror perspective and to see how terrorism has changed over time.
The Dash(s)
Dashboard 1: Terrorism & Terror Marketing (Link To Final Viz)
Dashboard 2: Terrorism Activity By Region (Link To Final Viz)
What Went Well
- Dataset had plenty of content to work with
- Colour choices to represent topic
- Clean and simple design
- Use of tooltips
Even Better If
- Social media data to lay over incident over time
- More vibrant/contrasting colours on map
- Figure out a way to address floating objects appearing on different places on Tableau Public
