Everyday Data Vis — Travel
Last month — tracking all of my Instagram ads — was exhausting. For November, I originally planned to also do something pretty ambitious, but due to some silly user error (and program problems), I lost a significant chunk of my data.
Not wanting to skip a month, I decided I’d have to use something I already had tracked. So with the combined power of Google Maps’ Timeline and my Google Calendar, I was able to track all of my movements in November!
The methodology
Since we’re going off historical data here, I didn’t really have to do a lot. Google Maps has this timeline feature that I have enabled which basically records all of your location movements (which is a little creepy, but was actually pretty useful) so I could look at that day by day, and I’m really serious about keeping my calendar accurate so I was able to use that to fill in any weird things I couldn’t figure out.
Where I went (sorta)
Sorta only because I’m being a bit vague purposefully about locations like… my house.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with my lovely city of Melbourne, Australia, it’s down the South East of Australia. The city itself is that small collection of rectangles you can see in the left-hand side of the map, and the really thick line going to the right is (vaguely) where my house is.
November was, in a lot of ways, a pretty abnormal month in terms of movements. I did have pretty standard back-and-forths between my office and my apartment, but I also went on a giant east-side roadtrip with a friend on a day off — I pretty much never go that far away!
There’s also a slightly dark line that ends in Box Hill (near the centre), which was where my partner was living for part of the month. He then moved in with me a few weeks in, and I didn’t have to go that way any more!
I also had a bout of the flu for over a week, so the trips to and from work are a lot less frequent than usual!
Transport diversity
Also a bit of a weird thing for November was just how much variety there was in my methods of transportation. Usually I tend to take the tram (or walk), but in November, I took the train a lot more frequently and was in cars a lot more often. This definitely added a lot of variety to the map — I think if you looked at my average month, it would almost be identical to my tram route!
Can’t really do a lot with this information…
Yeah, I’m not really sure if there’s an action I really want to take based on this information. Maybe my action should be to turn off location services for Google, since its timeline is pretty freakishly specific.
Coolest finding
Probably not really a finding, but it is pretty cool seeing everything on a map. I’ve never worked with a map visualisation like this before, so it was pretty fun trying to figure out how to do it!
I ended up grabbing the map from Snazzy Maps, drawing the lines on in Sketch (yeah, I know it’s weird, but whatever), and then I animated it with Photoshop.
Most difficult thing
Last minute data plan 😭 Luckily I did have something I could do instead, but I’d already done some work on my original project idea. It was pretty cool, honestly — I’m going to keep it a secret since I think I’ll get to it next year!
What’s next?
Since we’re wrapping up 2019, I’d like to review my year in the most data-riffic way possible!
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