Looking at the various medal standings for medals awarded during any Olympics games is all very well, but it doesn’t really show where each country won its medals or whether particular sports are dominated by a single country. Ranked as they are by the number of gold medals won, the medal standings don’t make it easy to see what we might term “strength in depth” – that is, we don’t get an sense of how the rankings might change if other medal colours were taken into account in some way.
Four years ago, in a quick round up of visualisations from the 2008 Beijing Olympics (More Olympics Medal Table Visualisations) I posted an example of an IBM Many Eyes Treemap visualisation I’d created showing how medals had been awarded across the top 10 medal winning countries. (Quite by chance, a couple of days ago I noticed one of the visualisations I’d created had appeared as an example in an academic paper – A Magic Treemap Cube for Visualizing
Olympic Games Data).
Although not that widely used, I personally find treemaps a wonderful device for providing a macroscopic overview of a dataset. Whilst getting actual values out of them may be hit and miss, they can be used to provide a quick orientation around a hierarchically ordered dataset. Yes, it may be hard to distinguish detail, but you can easily get your eye in and start framing more detailed questions to ask of the data.
Whilst there is still a lot more thinking I’d like to do around the use of treemaps for visualising Olympics medal data using treemaps, here are a handful of quick sketches constructed using Google visualisation chart treemap components, and data scraped from NBC.
The data I have scraped is represented using rows of the form:
Country, Event, Gold, Silver, Bronze
where Event is at the level of “Swimming”, “Cycling” etc rather than at finer levels of detail (it’s really hard finding data at even this level of data in an easily grabbable way?)
I’ve then treated the data as hierarchically structured over three levels, which can be arranged in six ways:
- MedalType, Country, Event
- MedalType, Event, Country
- Event, MedalType, Country
- Event, Country, MedalType
- Country, MedalType, Event
- Country, Event, MedalType
Each ordering provides a different view over the data, and can be used to get a feel for different stories that are to be told.
First up, ordered by Medal, Country, Event:
This is a representation, of sorts, of the traditional medal standings table. If you look to the Gold segment, you can see the top few countries by medal count. We can also zoom in to see what events those medals tended to be awarded in:
The colouring is a bit off – the Google components is not as directly scriptable as a d3js treemap, for example – but with a bit of experimentation it may be able to find a colour scheme that better indicates the number of medals allocated in each case.
The Medal-Country-Event view thus allows us to get a feel for the overall medal standings. But how about the extent to which one country or another dominated an event? In this case, an Event-Country-Medal view gives us a feeling for strength in depth (ie we’re happy to take a point of view based on the the award of any medal type:
and the Country Medal Event view allows us to then tunnel in on the gold winning events:
I think that colour could be used to make these charts even more accessible – maybe using different colouring schemes for the different variations – which is something I need to start thinking about (please feel free to make suggestions in the comments:-). It would also be good to have a little more control over the text that is displayed. The Google chart component is a little limited in this respect, so I think I need to find an alternative for more involved play – d3js seems like it’d be a good bet, although I need to do a quick review of R based treemap libraries too to see if there is anything there that may be appropriate.
It’d probably also be worth jotting down a few notes about what each of the six hierarchical variants might be good for highlighting, as well as exploring just as quick doodles with the Google chart component simpler treemaps that don’t reveal lower level structure, leaving that to be discovered through interactivity. (I showed the lower levels in the above treemaps because I was exploring static (i.e. printable) macroscopic views over the medal standings data.)
Data allowing, it would also be interesting to be able to get more detailed data visualised (for example, down to the level of actual events- 100m and Long Jump, for example, rather than Tack and Field, as well as the names of individual medalists.
PS for another Olympics related visualisation I’ve started exploring, see At A Glance View of the 2012 Olympics Heptathlon Performances
PPS As mentioned at the start, I love treemaps. See for example this initial demo of an F1 Championship points treemap in Many Eyes and as an Ergast Motor Sport API powered ‘live’ visualisation using a Google treemap chart component: A Treemap View of the F1 2011 Drivers and Constructors Championship
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