As the 23rd edition of the Winter Olympics is currently taking place in Pyeongchang, South Korea, Week 7 of Makeover Monday 2018’s dataset is a natural fit as it’s about the Winter Olympics!
This week’s Makeover looks at an original visualisation that was created in Tableau by Rody Zakovich on the Winter Olympics. As I had some time to be immersed in the viz, this was one of those vizzes where its so exceptional that I would find it difficult to find any improvements at all but I managed to find a couple that I will share to you.
Original Viz
What I like
- I love the use of a small multiple chart to illustrate the countries that have participated in every Winter Olympic Games since 1924-2014.
- The use of bronze, silver and gold colours to highlight an individual country’s medal whilst also making this clear outside the chart.
- There’s filters which make it simple to find out which sport and country has won the most medals in that event.
What could be improved?
- As mentioned earlier, its such a great viz from Rody that it would only need a few tweaks here and there.
- Navigating the viz is a bit tricky due to the long-form layout albeit it would make it easier to find out the medals won by each country.
What I did
- As my knowledge of winter sports only extends as far as ice hockey, I wanted to get outside my comfort zone and learn about a new winter sport.
- I had toyed with the idea of various charts (stepped line charts, radial bar charts, pareto charts) although time restrictions made it difficult to complete.
- Line charts were my best friend this week so I wanted to create a viz around this chart.
- Inspired by Mark Bradbourne’s viz, I focused on the Top 3 Countries in Cross-Country Skiing as the Scandinavian countries dominated the event.
I must admit, I struggled with this dataset to produce a viz and I came very close to almost throwing the towel in. However, I managed to persist and produce this viz on the Winter Olympics for Makeover Monday 2018 – Week 7.
