The ramblings of a madman - day 4

by Tim Ryan

9:18 the data is up and today we’re looking at a scientific study that looks into the decline of bug populations based on how many/few hit cars number plates. Andy has said that to get our heads around the data (there is not very much of it) we should first read the accompanying resources. So essentially we’ve been tasked with a literature review, I did loads of these at uni so it’s a nice little throwback for me.

9:20 going to take some key findings from the papers and jot them down here so I know what I’m looking for in the data.

9:24 just had a design idea, might try and make my dashboard resemble a piece of academic literature, might make it look cool. Gonna use galliard font like NEJM. Experiment with drop caps as well.

11:13 struggling a bit with motivation this morning, haven’t done the data prep yet and I’m just looking at the articles. I’ve come up with quite a lot of ideas but have absolutely nothing to show for it yet, I think I can get the data prep done by lunch and then I can have a pretty good charge at it in the last couple of hours in tableau, this approach worked pretty well yesterday at least.

11:55 goal accomplished I think, the data prep I want to do has been done, not following the crowd today and choosing not to join all the data, primarily because I don’t think it needs to be joined. Also not touching the car data, mostly because I don’t think it’s very interesting and because the article has already stated the relationship on the data isn’t great.

15:31 Tableau is all done, I’m one minute late but I’m sure I’ll be forgiven. I actually quite like what I’ve got here, I think that I could have put some more interesting stats into the dash and perhaps made some more interesting insights, but baring in mind that I only really started in tableau at 1pm I’m very happy with what I ended up with. Time to see what Andy makes of what I’ve got.

16:15 Great success! Andy was a fan, didn’t even look at the graphs because a grand total of 30 minutes was spent on them, but he did say it looked good and spotted that it was supposed to look like a research paper straight away, even suggested that if I could find the original author that I should send it to him and let him see what would be possible with tableau, I’ll try and find him but initial searches didn’t give me much hope.

That’s all for today, pretty chill day, struggled with motivation at the start but once I got going it was very fun. Nearing the end of dashboard week now so I can look forward to that to get me through tomorrow hopefully.

If you want to see my viz (if you’re going to click on any of my links this week click this one) it can be found here https://public.tableau.com/profile/tim1752#!/vizhome/RecreatingaResearchpaperwithTableauVisuals/Researchpaperdash?publish=yes