My goal this week was to correct my failures from last week, so I focused almost exclusively on building the starburst/sunburst chart. As promised to the viewers, I will also record a separate tip video for how to build them.

Here's the WatchMeViz and the viz is below that.

Week 41: Music was probably the easiest from a data collection perspective so far. In week 32, I tracked everything I listened to, so I didn't want to do that again. Inspired by Andy Cotgreave's great post about his music trends I thought I would do an analysis on the music that's in my iTunes playlist. I've never thought about looking at the type of music I listen to, how long songs are, nor the bands and their songs that I prefer, so this provided me with the perfect opportunity.

This time, I started my analysis in Vizable and after a few minutes I had a good feeling for the overall patterns in the data.

Having fun today using @VizableApp to understand my music data for #DearDataTwo Week 41 w/ @HighVizAbility pic.twitter.com/z23jE9Mcxl

— Andy Kriebel (@VizWizBI) January 21, 2016

Using Vizable this way definitely helped speed up my analysis in Tableau. I like how Vizable keeps me from overthinking the analysis. It encourages me to play rather than overdiagnose. That being what it is, I was quite surprised to learn how much alternative music I listen to. I suppose that goes back to when I was in college and that genre first became more popular.

I also had a playlist of the songs that are in my primary running playlist, so I used that throughout the analysis as well to help me see if what I listened to in general was the same music I listen to when I run.

For the final visualisation, I accidently created this radial pie chart thingy. I would never create something like this if it weren't for this project. I consider this more "data art" than data visualisation.


Click through the story below to see how I conducted my analysis and to see the postcard I created.

I’m not exactly sure what to call this type of chart from Nielsen, so I’m going to stick with calling it a spiral chart.  It’s just plain awful. 

I understand the ranking, only because of the numbers, not the chart.  I’m guessing the colors are used so that you can follow them around the race track.  Wouldn’t a simple bar chart be so much better?

If this doesn't make you cringe or make your eyeballs spin, I'm not sure what will. On top of that, I have no idea what it's trying to tell me.