Starting the next stage: Visualization
Intro
I’ve been spending the past 200 hours (over a series of months) gathering and cleaning up my data set as part of my final project for an MA in Online Journalism.
This has included:
- deciding on the best data set to use
- finding a source
- scraping that data
- developing my basic skills of Scraperwiki, Yahoo Pipes, Outwit Hub
- Cleaning up the data with a combination of Outwit Hub, Excel, Word and notepad (for stripping and replacing)
- Checking and double checking the data for errors
- Pivoting the data and reducing it into a usable form (converting a Top 40 list into a single line of Genre counts her chart)
So now I have reduced my 85000 lines into more like 2,000 – a lot easier to use.
I am now at the stage where I can begin to think about the visualization.
With previous projects I have used ManyEyes and Tableau (my favourite) and used the ability to change setting quickly to PLAY with the options, and try a huge amount of different charts.
As I am working within the bounds of a project, called Is Rock Dead?, I must not forget some of the main facets of the project (initially set out in my MA Proposal Document pdf)MA Online Journalism Proposal Rock is Dead-3 (NOTE: My tutor Paul Bradshaw advised that I focus on ONE element of this to avoid “mission creep”.)
So I will focus on the larger GENRE chart first and take it from there!
- to answer the question – Is Rock Dead? Is it on its last legs?
- Does music genre go in cycles – radio/music professionals claim rock, pop and dance/electro go in cycles over time – is this true? What are those cycles?
- What is powering the rock genre in the charts? What is the future looking like for rock?
If I have time I would also like to produce some extra visualizations showing the breakdown of the genre in the charts, the hot genres, the dead ones and perhaps WHY some of them peak at other times.
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In order to show the pattern of genre over time, I need to produce a version of David McCandless’ Mountains Out Of Molehills Interactive – do I simply copy this, or produce a version of it?
I must confess, I’m not a HUGE fan of 3D charts – I think anything that is asking the eye to compare to values, should not place them on a 3rd axis …
The chart wins in the fact that NONE of the values are obscured, but it’s hard to compare them
Whilst I think this chart is very interesting, I am not sure it’s EXACTLY what I am after.
Over the next few days I will be using various visualization tools to see which are the most effective – watch out for a blog post on these at some point
I am now experimenting with various chart shapes and designs – you can check them on Flickr out there – Id love to get your feedback on what works, what doesn’t etc!
Is rock dead? Support blog 
Good luck with the visualisation phase. My advice? Don’t necessarily have a planned visualisation in mind when you start playing with the data. Some of the best vizzes I ever did were based on pure exploration. If you start with an end in mind (eg Mts from M.hills) you prevent a serendipitous discovery. This is particularly the case if you’re going to use Tableau (I blogged about this here: http://www.thedatastudio.co.uk/blog/the-data-studio-blog/andy-cotgreave/the-journey-is-the-destination)
Looking forward to seeing the results!
I totally agree – some of the ones I did for my Datamud project (http://datamud.wordpress.com/) fell out of the sky!
This is why I’m a big fan of Tableau – the freedom and ease to play and discover new ways …
Great blog post by the way .. and I love the trellis – stumbled across a similar one recently (http://bit.ly/qJ93ja) .. still trying to work out if mine says anything useful but it’s a nice idea!
Thanks again for your comments!