Gwilym first started serious data analysis during his PhD in the neuroscience of language. He learned how to obtain, clean, process, and visualise data to examine his participants’ brain activity during language learning, but soon realised it was more fun to use those same techniques to look at sports statistics. After honing his data skills through scraping cricinfo and falling in love with ggplot2 in R, he decided to switch out of academia and into the big wide world of data visualisation. Outside the office, Gwilym also brews his own beer, which may or may not help the data viz creative process.
Gwilym Lockwood
Blog Posts
Thu 26 Jan 2017 | Gwilym Lockwood
I like big numbers and I cannot lie: how to make numbers pop out from KPI dashboards in Tableau
Good KPI dashboards make their key numbers really pop out of the screen. You
want to look at a dashboard and instantly know exactly where things stand. This
often means having a whacking great number right at the top. This blog will show
you how to make one of those
Fri 06 Jan 2017 | Gwilym Lockwood
Coxcomb charts in Alteryx and Tableau: your one-stop blog shop.
I’ve been playing with radial and Coxcomb plots recently, which, like all the best things, are both beautiful and complicated. This sort of chart was pioneered by Florence Nightingale to show military deaths during the Crimean War, and over 150 years later, they’re still quite difficult to produce
Fri 30 Dec 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
If I had to start all over again...
…I’d have done all kinds of things and not done all kinds of other things. I’d
be popular and successful and happy and speak twelve languages and… wait, we’re
only talking about the Data School? Oh.
I’m not sure I’d change anything, to be honest
Thu 29 Dec 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
With great data comes great responsibility
Today’s blog is on “how to be successful in the Data School”. I’m not sure I’m
the one to be the judge of that – you’d have to ask Andy whether or not I’ve
been successful – but one thing I keep coming back to and fixating on is basic
numeracy and checking your figures
Wed 28 Dec 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
What is the most challenging thing about the Data School?
It’s self-reflection blog week at the Data School, and today’s topic is “what is
the most challenging thing about the Data School?”.
That’s a hard one, to be honest
Thu 01 Dec 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Keeping things regular: how to use schedules on Tableau Server
It’s Tableau Server week here at the Data School, and we’ve been learning about
keeping things regular with schedules.
Schedules are pretty straightforward – the most difficulty we’ve had with them
as a group is settling on how to pronounce it
Wed 30 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
ASCII and ye shall receive: approximating graphs in tooltips
One of the exciting announcements from the Tableau conference last month was
that we’ll soon be able to put graphs inside tooltips
Mon 28 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Using Gantt bars to fill the space between time-series lines (or, you Gantt always get what you want)
I wrote about this quickly in a previous blog
[https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/gwilym-lockwood/small-things-tips-tricks-i-picked-revizzing-phd-work/]
, but felt it required a little more attention to detail.
Sometimes, it’s useful to shade the area between two lines in a time-series
plot
Fri 25 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Viridis colours in Tableau
When I work in R, I often use the viridis colour palette for my graphs. It’s
pretty, it’s way better for colour blind people than most palettes, and because
it diverges more towards each end, the extreme data points stand out. More on
that here
[https://cran.r-project
Thu 24 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
All the small things: tips and tricks I picked up when revizzing my PhD work
I spent a while this week creating an interactive viz
[https://public.tableau.com/profile/gwilym#!/vizhome/Howiconicityhelpspeoplelearnnewwordssupplementaryviz/ERPexplorationviz]
of my favourite paper [http://www.collabra.org/articles/10.1525/collabra.42/]
from my PhD
Thu 24 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Tooltips: going beyond simple information
Tooltips are great. They automatically capture the information that goes into
the view (and more that you can drag in besides), and then pop up when you
explore the viz.
For example, here’s a tooltip from one of my first vizzes at the Data School
Tue 22 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Using dummy variables for sizing Gantt Bars in Tableau
I was looking at UK population statistics recently to see how the rates of
births, deaths, immigration, and emigration rates have changed over the last few
decades.
I had a bit of an issue with Gantt bars in Tableau while doing this
Thu 10 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Simple filters and parameter filters
This blog post is about the difference between regular filters and parameter
filters in Tableau. It uses the same dataset of my Spotify listening history
that I used in my last blog
[https://www.thedataschool.co.uk/gwilym-lockwood/sets-groups-rock-roll/] about sets and groups
Wed 09 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Sets and groups and rock and roll
It’s teaching week at The Data School, and I’m doing sets and groups. Quite a
lot of it is straightforward, but one useful trick I’ve learned is using
combined sets to get around those times when level of detail calculations might
not work and/or might be too complicated to keep track of
Sun 06 Nov 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Getting around Tableau level of detail calculations in Alteryx
I’m about a month into my Data School training now, and the thing I’ve found
most frustrating about Tableau so far is doing calculated fields.
Simple ones are fine, because I can think through the logic. For example, take
this dataset
[https://public.tableau
Thu 27 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Calculating the top n percent in Alteryx: different methods, different results.
There are two ways of calculating top whatever percent of things in Alteryx.
Actually, that’s probably not true, there are probably several different ways,
each more convoluted than the last, but I have found two straightforward ways of
doing it
Wed 26 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Alteryx for R Souls: summarize
One thing I do miss about R is that dplyr and ggplot2 used British (well, NZ)
English spelling. Alteryx uses American English spelling, but when you love
something, you love it despite its flaws. So it goes for the Summarize tool
Tue 25 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Alteryx for R Souls: an introduction to macros
Most guides to macros in Alteryx copy and paste the phrase “a macro is a
workflow that has the flexibility to be run as a single tool within another
workflow”. I don’t find this a particularly informative definition.
Instead, to put it in R terminology, a tool is like a function
Mon 24 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Alteryx for R Souls: a quick introduction
I’m an R Soul, I’ve always been an R Soul, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. The
first time I saw the way Alteryx looked on the screen, I wasn’t impressed
Mon 17 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Vizzes revisited
After a few days of intense Tableau training, one of our first tasks was to take
the viz we submitted as part of our first application to The Information Lab.
This was a bit of an eye-opener for me
Tue 11 Oct 2016 | Gwilym Lockwood
Second Day at The Data School: Makeover Monday (well, Tuesday)
“Don’t think about it”, Andy says. “Just publish it”, Andy says.
Duly noted. Our first class assignment is at the end of our second day. It’s
nothing big; we just have to take one of the most popular Makeover Monday
datasets ever
[https://uk.pinterest