Portfolio 5

Visualization done right

For the data visualization portfolio assignment, I chose a visualization that shows the amount of Internet country codes. The visualizations looks like this:


I chose this data visualization not because of some underlying trend that it discovers. But rather, the fact that the visualizations accomplishes its main task. It takes what would be numbers and transforms them into a picture and very understandable.

What you do see is Canada(CN) and India(IN) are the two most commonly used country codes. This is counter intuitive because most people would say the the United States should be. The .us country code is fairly popular but is not used as much because most of the United States uses other domains. Such as .com, .edu, and .org.

One surprise is that Nigeria(NG) is such a used country code. Another surprise would be how little the Japan(JP) country code is used.

This visualization does help us visualize the data, much more so than the numbers themselves.

Visualizing our own data

For my own dataset, I chose to compare Major League Baseball, American League teams. The dataset has players, teams, position, and salaries. The visualization for the data is pretty interesting. It is as follows:

This particular visualization shows teams in each pie, and the slices are the amount of salary paid to a possition. What is interesting is that most teams concentrate their funds on pitchers.

This was pretty fun to do. I had to look up the salaries of the players and make an excel spreadsheet accordingly. The formatting was pretty simple. Once I got a feel for how many-eyes wanted the data, the uploading was easy. My data could be represented by numerous visualizations. I found these pie charts the be the most visually beneficial.

The visualization could be interesting for players who were wondering what teams financial concerns were. A player could see that a team wants to pay their first basement a lot. If the player was a first basemen, he might be interested in that team. Also, if a team was scouting the opposition they could look at this visualization and see what that team's focus was.

Just for the heck of it, here is another visualization of the same data: