I recently used a Makeover Monday data set for pizza slices in NY/NJ. I had some cool ideas as to what I could do, but as I learned with my NFL Attendance Analysis viz (that’s still a WIP), I really just need to time box myself to one night.
With the NFL viz, I was going to visualize all teams at first, then I was going to focus on my home team, the Commanders. I was talking to my husband about this viz, and he said, “You know that they have reduced the stadium capacity, right?”
Uh, no. I did not know that. And it would make for a great data story. I looked up stadium capacity by year and had a plan. By this time, it was beyond Monday & not only did I need to focus on other things, I was still trying to see if there was a chart I could tweak and salvage from what I had already done.
I feel like these charts should be a piece of art called: “Life is messy, so are these charts”
While I had an idea, I was just lacking on how to execute on it. My brain was messy like that bump chart. That’s when I realized two things:
- I really need to time box my viz time to vizzing while watching Sunday Night Football.
- I need to be in the tool more.
When I did this viz, I didn’t do much data cleaning or prep work. I basically just connected to the data and started to viz. And then I remember something from the mid-2010s, where there was a whole thing about not checking data quality while promoting visualizations. And while I’m not really promoting my viz on twitter or reddit, it is publicly available. That’s when I decided to share in the details that this is practice and not rely on this visualization. I also decided to use a hashtag so that it was searchable and people/me could see all of fizzes where I’m touching the tool.
And if you know me, you know that I love alliteration…a lot! That’s why I decided to use #touchthetool as my hashtag. I love it and I think it will give me the permission to create (and clean, when needed).
