Today we were looking at battles in Britain (full task in Andy’s blog here). I didn’t have such a structured process today and definitely suffered for it! I forgot to sketch out my ideas until semi-late in the process and then didn’t even stick to my idea anyway. The temptation to play with the data in Alteryx was just too great today!

Although that’s not entirely true, I did maintain the idea to compare all the battles between the Scottish and the English. I did my Master’s in Edinburgh, so I definitely have a soft spot for Scotland.

Alteryx:

My workflow ended up being a lot messier today! From the original webpage it was possible to extract Battle, War, Date and Participants. I later discovered you could also scrape the pop-out bits of information from the map at the top of the page. However, this unfortunately wasn’t consistent for all battles. Nor was the presence of the Key Facts table at the bottom of individual battle webpages.

So that explains why there are so many different streams to this workflow; I had to extract the information in a variety of different methods.

I also have a confession to make… For 4 battles, the only way to find the number of troops would have been to search through an entire paragraph and RegEx out the relevant information. I was short of time and decided to manually input this data into a text input tool instead. Please forgive me!

Tableau:

With Andy’s extra challenge to use Tableau 10.0.22, the shortage of time and my lack of measures data, I decided to keep it simple again today. The design definitely could be better, but I enjoyed discovering the insights of the data. Only 2 of the 13 battles between England and Scotland were won with more troops. Definitely a lesson that strategy is key!