For our second day of Dashboard Week, we were tasked to look at a very dry subject: Parliamentary rules. Not only that, but we had to scrape the data from a website and Andy wasn’t even sure that we would be able to do that, so although I didn’t start the day filled with hope, I liked the challenge and the perspective of being able to use RegEx…
For my work flow, I first pulled out the main table on the landing page, nice and neat, which proved to be a complete waste of time, and then pulled out the rules individually.
The end result looking like so (what I am most proud of, hence feeling the urge to show it -trailing spaces refused to be cleaned):
But what to do with that?! The only line chart I could pull out of this data looked a bit sad, so I thought it would be “fun” to have a look at the different Speakers that ruled the House of Commons. Which proved a little bit more challenging than expected (cue failed multi-row formula, unspeakable tinkering in Excel and pulling my hairs out at a date field which wouldn’t behave).
So in the end, I still have a bar chart, but it is at least coloured by party and some insight that shows that despite having had less tenure, the Labour Speakers have had a tendency to pass more rules under their terms.
Link to viz