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It’s a Witch Hunt @ VizClub!

Quick notes to recap:

  • We’ve finally moved to a pub (ode to true VizClub fashion). Next time we’ll bring a pocket projector so we can ALL see the screen.
  • Our original dataset on weed sales/activity in Denver didn’t pan out (our meeting was on April 20th)
  • We differed back to Sophie’s suggestion on a dataset about the witches of Scotland

Gotta be honest, Sophie really delivered on this dataset. Despite the strange and obscure topic, the dataset is robust. Not only does it span almost 300 years, but comes with 72 pages of documentation/definitions and schema map. It even has the lot/lats of where they were accused and case notes.

Really cool right? Even the case notes are old-timey and creepy! Really cool right? Even the case notes are old-timey and creepy!

As a side note, it doesn’t seem like Tableau recognizes Scotland’s county’s at all. At first Andy suggested this may be the old recorded name… but then was corrected that its still named that today. #everythingisoldhere

Here’s where we ended up:

Surprisingly, there are male witches?

The chart just above this is a % of total split between male and female for every year in the dataset. I am surprised that even the “low season” of witch hunts, there can still be high proportions of men persecuted.

Do witches run in families?

Yes. The dataset includes first and last names as separate fields as well as each year they were accused. We created a word cloud and ended up concluding that there may have been 3 generations of Thomsons that were accused of being witches.

Corroborating the data with the outside world

Mara was on her phone furiously doing research and asked us to look up tidbits of info on Scottish witches and looked up Isobel Gowdie. I always find it to be a surreal experience when a real life story is reflected in the data. However, the team ended up getting sidetracked and started entering random names into the search filter.

Sizing for Mobile

You might have noticed that there are lots of interesting details I’ve mentioned here that didn’t make it to the final viz. While not an explicit talking point, I think we all agreed that we’re reading and looking at our vizzes on our phone, hence the mobile size. Maybe next time we’ll be able to add things more scroll-y style a la a Matt Francis, but it was 9:30 (time to wrap up!). I expect we’ll be doing more of these in the future.

To Wrap Up

The night rolled out in a completely unexpected way – from analyzing weed sales in Colorado, to then exploring the world of witches in early modern Scotland. You really never know where you’ll end up at Viz Club.

Oo and thanks to the Pauls for being good sports. That was all Andy.

Thatcher Thatcher Milk Snatcher: Make your Data Stories More Engaging with this Amazing Tableau Tip!

Just want to say upfront that VizClub March Edition was a huge improvement on the last session.

  • #ThrowbackThursday was on (that was me)
  • The dataset was required less than 3.5 hours of cleanup (thank you JMac)
  • Beer was on tap (which I got in on since I realized Coffee and Pizza just didn’t make sense)

Big shout out to Sophie who was kind enough to provide the pizzas despite being sick.

Sophie also made another huge contribution to our viz session – being the first to introduce unicode characters as a navigation element to create a fluid user experience. I first wrote about unicode characters in vizzes with the Data School so I’m always finding new uses for them.  It’s so easy to do, I’ll be stealing it for my own future vizzes!

Here’s a gif of the viz moving through the storypoints with unicode characters.

Read below on how to do this for your own vizzes!

Step 1: Copy and Paste a Large Circle Unicode character  (like this one!) into your storypoints template.

Step 2: Here’s the magic. Set the font so the unicode character will stand out.

Here I’ve set it to size 28. Go into Story->Format and set the shading in Navigator to “No Fill”. Then squish the titles on the top and bottom so they line up perfectly line a series of dots…just like navigating through a slick app.

Voila! Next level design in 1 minute right?

Getting back to Viz Club, in terms of exploring the dataset, we found a couple of interesting insights.

  • Overall consumption of sugar as a product in itself has gone down over the years (probably displaced by other sugary products)
  • Vegetable consumption has also gone down 🙁

Then somehow we got to the introduction of our story when we were looking at the consumption of milk in the early 80s. Wondering why there was a spike in ’82, we realized that Margaret Thatcher’s tax cuts in education boomed the consumer market for milk. For me and Andy, who are from North America, this is something we never knew about UK politics!

Couldn’t believe it actually shows up in the google search

Another interesting insight was looking at how potato consumption has changed in the UK.

@davidmpires Took this picture of the area charts of potatoes. I think the dip was actually due to a bad crop year, rather than a sudden decreased appetite.  @davidmpires Took this picture of the area charts of potatoes. I think the dip was actually due to a bad crop year, rather than a sudden decreased appetite.

You might be curious to wonder why the middle of that horrendous area chart there is a dip. Luckily we were too, and found out there was a heatwave in 1976 and a potato shortage in the US.

More importantly, what did people eat if not potatoes? Turns out, they SWITCHED to a new market of potatoes – notably instant potatoes.

By the way, if you click on the this image, it will take you to this viz where the ad will start playing. This was intentional as we've already established it was #throwbackthursday and automatic music on websites was THE hip thing to do in the 2000's #RIPmyspace. By the way, if you click on the this image, it will take you to this viz where the ad will start playing. This was intentional as we’ve already established it was #throwbackthursday and automatic music on websites was THE hip thing to do in the 2000’s #RIPmyspace.

Apparently the people at Cadbury’s were smart cookies and did this very clever(?) ad for Smash Mash Potatoes. I’m told everyone and their grandmother has seen this but here it is if you haven’t. Skyrocketed the sales of instant potatoes I’m sure.

We capped off the night with another beer as I sped formatted the viz. Overall, it was a fantastic night of pizza, beer and learning about politics and robot aliens! Can’t wait for the next one 😀