Sunday 19 January 2014

So what can you visualise?

With rumours circulating the internet about a new Season of 24 (and a movie to boot!), I thought two things:

1. It's been a while since I watched a series and the English weather is defintely condusive to this at the moment.
2. Is it worth making Series 9?

Well, instantly, young Miss Jedi Ninja stuck Series 7 on Netflix and I reached for the laptop to create a visualisation exploring viewing figures over the different series. And this led me to a conclusion, data analysis through tools like Tableau, can now measure pretty much everything and you can analyse data to understand the wider context.

Recent data visualisation highlights for me covering Pinball Machines (@paulbanoub), fantasy basketball (@dataremixed) and burning off your favourite foods in the Gym (@matt_francis) show that there really isn't any topic that it is now not possible to create a data visualisation about to aid your decision making as to whether you are: trying to make your gym trip more efficient, winning your basketball fantasy league, or, running your own Pinball Arcade business.

So google what you are interested, see if you can find some numbers and see if you can find you the underlying story in the numbers. And then let the world know because you never know who you might be helping! (just maybe not as much as saving the World like Jack Bauer)