Day 27: Exploring Google Trends for “Lin-Manuel Miranda”
Today’s Visualization
Title: There’s a million things he has done: Google Trends data for Lin-Manuel Miranda
Notes: I had fun learning about Miranda’s projects and appearances while researching the different peaks in this plot. I hope you enjoy looking at it as much as I enjoyed making it!
Tools: Google Trends, Google Sheets, Adobe Illustrator
Reflection
The content for today’s visualization was kind of an accident. Originally, I wanted to start building a dataset on what Lin Manuel Miranda has worked on (e.g., musicals vs. movies or acting vs. writing) over the course of his career. At some point, I got sidetracked and started looking at some visualizations built in partnership with Google Trends. While I was on the site, I decided to search for “Lin Manuel-Miranda” and saw some interesting peaks that I wanted to explore.
An important note: This data actually shows the search results for “Lin Manuel Miranda” (without a hyphen), even though he writes his name “Lin-Manuel Miranda” (with a hyphen). Wanting to respect how it’s actually written, I used Google Trends’s comparison tool to look at both; you can see the result in the graph below.
Looking at the plot, I noticed that “Lin-Manuel Miranda” (with a hyphen) and “Lin Manuel Miranda” (no hyphen) have similar peaks and overall shapes, but “Lin Manuel Miranda” (no hyphen) is a significantly more popular search term. I would guess that this is probably a result of minimal punctuation usage in Google searches. Personally, I know that I often omit punctuation for speed and ease of use purposes, so I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a “trend” (see what I did there?) across all Google searching. Since the plots had the same general shape, I used the search term with no hyphen because those results provided more data.
One drawback of Google Trends is its scale and method of measuring. It plots “interest over time,” which the site explains with this blurb:
“Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.”
This means that we’re not seeing raw search numbers, just relative instances of a given term. It’s useful for exploratory purposes like this because it inspires you to investigate certain dates and periods of time, but it’s not always a helpful way to measure and plot data.
As for today’s viz, the foundation is a basic line plot showing interest over time for the search term “Lin Manuel Miranda” from January 2016 to March 2022. After creating that, I looked into the biggest peaks to see what spurred an increase in searches for the name. With a lot of help from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Wikipedia page and Google searches of my own, I pieced together his creations, accomplishments, and appearances from those dates. To corroborate my theories, I compared the search popularity of “Lin Manuel Miranda” and each catalyst. Below is one example, showing search history for “Lin Manuel Miranda” in blue and “In the Heights” in red. In the Heights obviously has more searches, but the parallel peaks are distinguishable as well.
Trying to figure out which event contributed to each spike felt like a scavenger hunt, and I really enjoyed the challenge :) I hope this was as interesting to you as it was to me. Look out for some more Lin-Manuel Miranda visualizations in the future! (And yes, I did listen to the Hamilton soundtrack while I created this viz. No regrets.)
Today’s Recommendation
The Viz: Visualizing a Century on Broadway by Steven Wong
I thought a Broadway-themed viz went well with today’s post, and this one showing the lifetime (how long a show runs) of every show in Broadway is impressively comprehensive. The linked article breaks it down and explains some of the trends in shows’ lifetimes, like the differences between musicals and plays. (Plus, I’m a sucker for a good pun!)
Until tomorrow,
Paige
