INTRODUCTION
My initial reactions to Tableau were enthusiastic. After the class demonstration and watching numerous tutorials from the Tableau website, I was eager to begin exploring Tableau during our class lab. I have strong interests in Human Rights and took this opportunity to explore the datasets available on the United Nations (UN) website as I hope to apply skills learned in this course to future coursework with datasets form the UN.
Figure 1.
I have been looking at the UN 2030 sustainability goals for my course in Information and Human Rights and I thought that using a dataset from one of the 17 goals would be a great place to begin my work with Tableau. This lab required a dataset of at least 1000 rows, so I was limited in my selection as much of the UN datasets, much to my surprise, contained under 1000 records/rows. I did end up finding one that peaked my interest, Global Internet Usage 2000-2015. Not only did this satisfy the minimum requirements for the lab, I also thought it would be a powerful visualization to create, especially when applied to a world map.
INSPIRATION
As I was gathering examples for inspiration, I came across the map noted below (Figure 1) on the Tableau site and thought this is what I would be working towards. Additionally, I wanted to experiment with other chart styles which I found on the Tableau and Our World in Data sites (Figures 2 & 3) to
show the differences between internet usage in what the UN calls developed regions and developing regions – the definitions of these categories proved extremely convoluted to discover as the UN dataset was built on World Bank data and their country and series notes on the data as well as the UN glossaries did not provide definitions for either term. Certainly for a larger and more detailed project I would absolutely define these terms but for this lab I chose to accept their terms as is, without further detail, though I am uncomfortable with this decision.
DATASETS & FRUSTRATION (a labor of love story)
I initially downloaded a csv file from the UN website and all seemed well. I decided to create a Google Sheet with the information and begin my Tableau lab. Initially things seems fine. I cleaned up the data, adjusting headers and ‘null’ data, then I started my first sheet in Tableau, the previously referred to global map visualization. Everything was looking great, Dr. Sula showed me how to use the page function and create slide show animation illustrating 15 years of global internet access. All was going splendidly and then all the values in the year column of my data source suddenly changed, every, single, entry. What was once a four digit year became a five digit random number. At first I thought it may be an issue with my data, so I downloaded the data again from the UN site, uploaded to Google Sheets.
Figure 3.
Once again, all went well, I was beginning my second visualization, a line graph, and then the same thing happened my year data magically transformed itself into a five digit number string. So I tried downloading the data in a different form, Excel, same thing happened. Then I consulted with Dr. Sula who was a stumped as I was having never seen this happen before. I then downloaded the csv file again from the UN and per his suggestion brought this file directly into Tableau rather than using GoogleSheets. I went through the whole data cleaning process again and then created my global map. Everything seemed to be going well but now the lab was close to three quarters complete and I had only successfully created one visualization! A little frustrated but unwilling to lose my cool, I pressed on and was able to complete two additional visualizations and a dashboard. I would really have preferred to have spent more time on the color palette, though I believe the blue works well, though not terribly striking which is what I was going for with my map. In the future I would like to explore different gradated color schemes to show extreme differences between values rather than working within blue that I settled on. If I had not run into the difficulties noted above, I would have like to play around with a completely different color aesthetic like the image shown below. I am not quite sure how I would have implemented it, but I like the black background and thought it was quite striking and beautiful.
RESULTS & FUTURE DIRECTIONS
In conclusion, I would have liked to do more with my dashboard, which I was unable to do with my limited time in class. Unfortunately, much of my intended directions were foiled by my data struggles, but I imagine this will not be the first time this happens and perhaps this was good practice for the future. My overall takeaways for this lab were A) Tableau is a great free software option, it is powerful and gives you nearly instant gratification for your work, B) Working with datasets is exciting but potentially extremely frustrating and requires patience and a cool demeanor, both of which I am still working on.
Link to my visualization – Global Internet Users 2000-2015 Visualization
REFERENCES
https://public.tableau.com/profile/cristina.pirola#!/vizhome/Casaereddito/Mobile
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-pop-by-political-regime
https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/gallery/life-hashtag?gallery=votd