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What is the purpose of this visualization?
What is the purpose of this visualization?
To visualize 120 years of Olympic Games data (the locations, medals, events, etc.) from country to country. The data was compiled by Olympics enthusiasts for other Olympics enthusiasts to work with the data.
What is the data?
What is the data?
The visualization is a shiny app built by Matthew Rautionmaa, a hobbyist. The visualization shows tabs for an About section, a map of where the Olympics had been held in the past, a map showing the number of medals (gold, silver, and bronze) won by country, graphs reflecting gender and sports, and the top athletes and countries by event.
The data includes 120 years of the Olympic Games data (excluding 1916, 1940 and 1944 due to WWI and WWII). The data consists of athlete’s names, sex, age, height, weight, and country, as well as the events, year, season, host city, and medal for all events. In total, the data consists of 271,000 rows.
How was this data collected?
How was this data collected?
This visualization used a dataset from Kaggle . The Kaggle dataset came from scraping the Olympic data page over on Sport-Reference.
Who was this visualization for?
Who was this visualization for?
The visualization was built for people to get a view of the general statistics related to how countries performed in the Olympics, what kind of men and women performed at the Olympics, etc. This visualization isn't really suited for a "deep dive" into the details of specific sports, or specific athletes and how they compared.
What questions does this visualization "solve"?
What questions does this visualization "solve"?
What countries received the most medals?
In the world map, we can see how many medals each country received in total. In the top countries tab, we can also tell what countries had the most medals in any sport. However, there are no options to look at every country who ever received a medal in a particular sport, only the top 10 countries in a sport.
How did male and female athletes compare?
While the graphs don't compare the accomplishments of male and female athletes (for example, comparing times of track male and female athletes), they compare the physical traits (height, weight, and age) of athletes.
How do the physical traits of athletes differ across sports?
The graphs comparing sports compares the heights, weights and age of all athletes across sports. We can compare these traits across each different sport to see how they compare to each other.
What athletes had the most medals in <insert sport>?
There is a particular tab about the top 10 athletes, that shows the 10 athletes who acquired the most medals. However it's not very in depth, and the number of people doesn't change, and there are no filters by sport, or by gender.
The graphic comparing males and females (in this case by comparing gender and age across time).
The tab showing the top countries that have medaled for a particular sport.
The tab showing the top athletes across all genders and sports.
Critiques:
Critiques:
What works?
What works?
The data is clearly shown, and the graphs are easy to understand with little instruction.
The sports and gender tabs are the best graphs in the whole visualization, because the color makes sense and doesn't take away from the data, as well as being easy to understand.
The host city map could be taking up a tab spot that another plot could've filled but it does its job, in showing information about where the cities hosted, as well as their latitude and longitude.
The About section actually does a good job of providing a synopsis of the data, and what each of the tabs are about. It also describes the packages that they used to build some of the maps, in addition to the standard shiny and shiny dashboard packages.
What doesn't?
What doesn't?
The main issue I found with the visualization is the speed of the shiny app. Loading tabs in the app is unbearable slow, and loading the app itself took 38.6 seconds (timed it because it took to long), which was only showed the About page.
Within the World Map tab, the data is a too difficult to distinguish what is important at first glance. There isn’t a key, to say that all countries in white either never got a medal or aren’t registered (it isn’t clear in the map), as well as not having solid country lines. For example, England isn’t registered in the map, despite knowing that England has received medals in the past. If someone didn’t know this, they’d just assume that England was missing from the map for not getting any medals, or finding it strange that they couldn’t find England anyways.
They could’ve improved this map, by adding a legend, giving every country bolder outlines, and providing filtering options or a different color scheme. Filtering options would make this map less clunky by showing all medals (bronze, silver, and gold), or filtering by medal type. By filtering it, you could give a color scheme (if they use green, we could set white as 0 medals, and deep green is the max number of medals for that type).
In the Host City map, a minor critique I’d give would be to list whether the city held a Winter or summer Olympics. It can be assumed, that if a location is incredibly far north that it is a Winter Olympics, however it’s not always the case. For example, the 2012 Olympic games were in London, which is fairly north, however those were summer Olympics
This image shows England not being filled in, despite having medals in its history.
Map of the cities that have hosted an Olympics
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