Due: 2016-02-26 01:45p
Now that you have a reasonable idea of how Tableau functions, I would like you to tell me a story. Storytelling with data is not some alternative form of literature, it is about leading someone to share deep insights by showing your analytic process. While we didn’t build an official “story” in Tableau, what we did with the FTE data was akin to storytelling. We started looking at enrollments across the divisions, “zoomed” in to the department level of natural sciences, and then looked at the impact on the department in the form of our new load measure (and this is not the only story in that data set).
The data you will be looking at is the complete set of Summer Olympic medals from 1896-2012.
I would like you to work in pairs. As I said in class, I would like you to approach this assignment using a pair-programming collaboration style. For those of you not familiar with the concept, this means that you do all work together on one computer. Make sure that you switch who is in the “driver’s seat” from time to time. This should be a noisy process, you should have a near constant flow of chatter about what you are doing, thoughts about how to visualize a piece of data, and things that pop out at you from the data.
I would like to see a minimum of six visualizations and at least four of these should be incorporated into a story. The wrong way to approach this is to think that you just have to make six visualizations. I expect you will make a lot visualizations, and most of them will be useless. Don’t keep them if they don’t tell you anything. Focus on finding interesting patterns and answering questions. The limits are just there to make sure you are really exploring and not just giving me some surface level simple visualizations (this isn’t to say your individual visualizations can’t be simple if they have something to say).
Use the Story tool in Tableau to create your story. Make sure to use annotation to make your story obvious. Read through the instructions for making stories to get a feel for what this process is like.
Important: When you first save your Tableau workbook, make sure to choose ‘Export Packaged Workbook…’. This will bundle the data up with the workbook (the default is to just reference it). It will be very annoying if I have to keep fixing references to data locations…
Please submit the completed workbook on Moodle. I only need a single workbook per group.