![]() Some were expected like when I took vacations with family but the two in late winter/early spring were unexpected. ![]() I was surprised to see the large gaps since I thought we played just about every week. Next, I wanted to see exactly when I played Scrabble throughout the year so I made an ugly but informative “date wheel” just showing dates of each game. ![]() I left it be without bothering to add the steps. Seeing the result was personally satisfying but not very visually interesting. My first idea was to take the turn-by-turn step charts from my original dashboard and overlap them to see if any general trends emerged beyond the obvious. With every new idea that pops in my head, I save a new version so my “sketches” are reusable and adjustable if I want to examine a new direction based on an earlier version. Density Design’s Raw is another tool I frequently use. NodeBox is great for this because I don’t get bogged down with coding and I can see instant results after creating a few nodes to manipulate the data. I enjoy brainstorming with real data-either a sample or the full set-to see if my ideas are realistic before polishing them. I enjoy seeing others’ sketches and have nothing against it but I do most “sketching” in my mind and feel sketching on paper slows me down. I’ve never felt sketching out ideas on paper worked for me. I enjoy working with more experimental ways of visualizing data than creating graphics that strictly inform-though I do enjoy a well-made chart. My goal was to explore the variety of points earned in each turn rather than who won or lost. It was personal, made me think of good times, and was detailed enough to generate some interesting results. The day I was asked to work on a project about nostalgia, one of my first thoughts was that Scrabble dataset. I did take a few pictures of the final boards though: Photo of a few final Scrabble boards Days 1 and 2 | “sketching” I wish I had the foresight to track which words were played and did so for the first two games of 2014 but lost motivation because I was prolonging each game by pausing after each turn to record which word was played, where it was played, and how many points it was worth. Screenshot of Scrabble database Screenshot of original dashboard After each game, I diligently entered the score data into my own MySQL database to query and generate a bare bones dashboard. I decided to track the weekly games with my father-hoping to chart our scores and find interesting patterns in our playing styles. (My father was an English teacher and I was always the scorekeeper.) They never let me win and for that I’m thankful but during the early years, they were formidable opponents-and still are!įast forward to 2013. My grandmother has is a force to be reckoned with in the game, my father has played for ages, and both of them taught me when I was about 12 as a way to build my language and math skills. The game has been part of my family since before I was. Taking a step back, it’s important to mention that I play a lot of Scrabble. Back in 2013, when I just started getting seriously interested in the artistic side of data visualization, I did what any newly-obsessed data junky would do: I picked a familiar subject and tracked it obsessively. ![]() Maybe I knew one day I would do more with it. Unlike many of my projects, I didn’t need to start by collecting data because I had already done so.three years ago. Whether or not that happened will be left to the reader but below is the story of how it came to be. When Shirley and Nadieh asked me to make a guest post for Data Sketches, I jumped at the opportunity but immediately panicked a little because I had agreed to the daunting task of creating something like their wonderful projects over the past six months. This post was been reproduced here with their permission on Decemand backdated with the date of the original release. Note: This was a guest post on Data Sketches-a collaboration between by Nadieh Bremer and Shirly Wu wherein they created 24 data visualization projects on a wide variety of topics that interested them.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |