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moseswootten

Weekly Roundup 09.29.24

I must admit while watching Liverpool (my armchair Premier League team) fight their way to victory at Wolves yesterday, I had completely failed to realise that a win would take us to the top of the table. It's fair to say that we've had easier fixtures than City or Arsenal so far but it's good to see that we're still at the top for now, and hopefully all of us fans are in for another tight title race over the season too.


Quick shoutout to Cole Palmer too, who is again single-handedly trying to keep Chelsea afloat. Four first half-goals - Erling who?


Now to the visualisations!


I'm kicking off this week with a pair of follow-ups to Adam Green's Bauhaus visualisation that we featured last week. Adam's viz inspired me to have a go at some Bauhaus, and I chose to represent two seasons of football results from Walthamstow FC using simple geometric shapes and bold colours. By design there isn't a key but you can click on the circles to reveal the results. From those you can see that each circle is one game, the red squares are home games, and the colour represents the result - yellow for a Walthamstow win, blue for a draw and black outline for a loss. The league winning season of 2021/22 shows quite the pattern of yellow circles, and only one loss at home.


Not content to rest on his first design, Adam returned this week with a second running design. This time, he traced the Bauhaus running man and added a little bar chart underneath to show his running distance per month. I think this is such a great merging of the ideas, and the bars are very sympathetic to the running man motif too. Plus the orange, black and orange-grey colour scheme is a winner.


Why don't you grab one of our datasets and have a go at something Bauhaus yourself! I'd love to see it.


Now to something totally different! Izumi has created a play-by-play of the Japan v Italy quarterfinal volleymatch from the Paris Games. This is a very innovative use of Tableau's pages feature allowing you to play through a series of animations. There's so many excellent details - the running total of points scored in each set on the left hand side, the rotation of the players on court, the title image changing to reflect the score and the custom images for off-court events like timeouts. I'm always excited to see how people are using Tableau in different ways and this is a great example. Also, a general shout out to the Japanese #SportsVizSunday #DataFam becuase they are always pushing the boundaries and creating things I haven't seen before. It's always really cool to see what they do.


Dan Wade is continuing to deliver the goods with his series on the Formula 1 season. I had the pleasure of meeting Dan in-person recently, and he told me that he had started this series with a few ideas but was mostly coming up with the ideas along the way based on what he was seeing. Incredible! I really like this track dominance map. It seems to me that Verstappen has the edge on more complex corners (perhaps reflecting his greater experience?) but Norris had the beating of him everywhere else.

Something else that surprised me was that when I looked at the map, I underestimated Norris' dominance compared to the sections at the top. I wonder whether that's because of uneven section length, or related to trying to assess the area of each track.


The last visualisation this week is Alex Varlamov's NBA Scorigami. A scorigami is a unique match result that hasn't happened before in a league's history. As time goes on, scorigamis become more rare but in a high-scoring sport like basketball there are still lots of remaining scores that haven't happened yet. Alex's visualisation does a brilliant job of capturing all this information and displaying it in a very cool heatmap - I particularly like that it is asymmetric with home points on one axis and visitor points on the other. The area chart in the top left shows the decreasing rate of new scorigamis too. I love the design aesthetic that Alex has chosen, which has a retro space feel which matches the pixellated galaxy feel of the dashboard too. Plus Alex has thought about the details and the tooltip shows all the games that have ended in that score combination.


The inestimable CJ Mayes has written an excellent tutorial blog on zooming in on scatter charts in Tableau. This is worth its weight in gold because this is a very common problem and really elegant solution. I love set actions.


And that's it for this week! Thanks as always to all our contributors and the #SportsVizSunday community - you're smashing it out the park!


Mo & the SVS team

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