K is for King

INTERACTIVE VIZ

The #AlphabetProject is intended to be a chance for Adam and I to practice our data viz skills and we purposely chose light-hearted topics for that reason.

This week is an exception.

My heart was broken last week. I cannot make sense of the events that led to the death of George Floyd and the truth is, I don’t want to. The fact that human beings are treated differently because of the colour of their skin is appalling. The fact that their lives are in danger because of it is beyond words.

The world doesn’t need my commentary on the matter, but in case there was any doubt

Fifty seven years ago, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech to the world, outlining his dream of equality. How and why we, as a human race, are still so far away from this dream is something I just cannot fathom.

So this week, I took a look back at the famous “I have a dream” speech, focusing in on the second half.

The Viz

I’d seen this post from Ken Flerlage and loved the circular link diagram that he created to show the flow of words in the US Constitution.

I’ve also seen plenty of chord diagrams lately and wanted to give one a go but had no clue how to start… Fortunately, Lorna Brown kindly pointed me in the direction of a few blog posts to follow along.

• Tutorial by Luke Stanke
• Blog post by Andy Kriebel

Both blogs were a great help – I ended up taking the logic from Luke’s blog and then used Andy’s blog to check that my alteryx workflow looked correct. I put all of the calculated fields into the alteryx workflow as well to try to take some of the weight out of Tableau but this was a simple copy and paste from Luke’s original workbook.

As always, any feedback, comments or questions are welcome.

What’s next?

It’s my choice of topic next and as much as I wanted to pick “L is for Laura”, I figured it would be quite difficult for Adam to collect data.

So I went with my second favourite L…

LEGO!

Keep your eyes peeled for Adam’s viz next week. And in the meantime, please be kind.