IronViz Is Here! Don’t miss out
It’s the time of the year when you get to participate in the biggest event by Tableau — IronViz.
What is IronViz?
Quoting Tableau “Iron Viz — the world’s largest virtual data visualization competition — ignites and showcases the power of the Tableau Community, giving you the opportunity to interact with data rockstars worldwide. Three finalists will advance to the 2021 Iron Viz Championship this November”
I love the Tag line used by Tableau for this event: Win or learn — You can’t lose! That is so true. This would be my third year participating in this event and even though I’m nowhere close to winning it, I have learned so much!
My Personal Experience
The year 1 of my participation back in 2019 — The theme for the qualifier was Music which is one of my passion! :)
So I went with my favorite band — Backstreet Boys
Now that I look back at this, I can’t think of a reason why I would go with a black and white theme 😄 But I had so much fun building this one!
This was my first time building a dataset as well. I remember that day pretty well, I was on a bus commuting home. I was scribbling ideas to showcase through the viz
- What were the albums?
- How long were the songs?
- What are the words used in the lyrics?
- Sentiment analysis of their songs
So I got my first set of information from the Wikipedia page itself. This was also my first time using python to extract data. I used a python script to iterate over albums to get the songs and their lyrics which was later converted to words per song.
If you’re interested in taking a look at the code, here you go — https://github.com/priyankadobhal09/Backstreet-Boys-Lyrics-Analysis
Go easy on me! It was my first code 😆
and the dataset -
Now let’s talk about my second experience with IronViz in 2020. The theme for this qualifier was “Well Being”. Being such a vast topic, it took me quite some time to figure out a topic. I remember discussing my thought process with Adam. This time I wanted to take some time to get feedback from my peers and colleagues at work on my final viz.
Has COVID-19 taken over the News?
How did I come up with this idea?
In March 2020, I went on a long vacation and when I came back to my home, the panic about COVID had already started in my City. I had a bit of a cold so I decided to work from home for a while. This lasted close to 2 weeks and by then my office had declared “work from home” due to the situation.
So ever since then, I’ve been at home and constantly bombarded by News Headlines.
Initially, I would keep checking COVID-related news — check for the daily figures. After some time it started getting overwhelming to me and so I took a step back from this.
So through this viz I took a look at the news headlines related to COVID.
To get the data, I web-scrapped the News Headlines from Times of India Archives — Jan 1, 2020 till July 19, 2020.
You can refer to my codes on Github -https://github.com/priyankadobhal09/News-extract
and the dataset: https://data.world/priyankad0993/news-headlines-times-of-india
Now let’s talk about my third experience with IronViz in 2021. There’s not much to say because I basically picked up one of my unfinished viz and managed to submit it just in time. So I’m not very proud of this viz but I just didn’t want to break my streak.
Guest on The Ellen DeGeneres Show
Why should you Participate?
I shared my experience to show you how fun it is! And hopefully, you see how excited I was with all of this and can take your first step towards this fantastic event.
Is that the only reason to participate? Well, not really. There is another one that might excite you a bit more. This event will give you some visibility in the community.
I was so overwhelmed with all the feedback and thoughts on the viz from the folks :) Definitely one of the best feelings ever.
I also found so many amazing folks last year through this event! And I have been following their vizes ever since then :)
Now I’ll let the experts do the talking :) A couple of videos to help you get started.
See you on the other side!
Thanks for the read :)
