A couple of months ago I posted about using Flourish to build a bar chart race data visualization. Shortly after that Flourish had another blog post highlighting all the different ways their site could be used to visualize election data, and I've had it bookmarked waiting for another opportunity to experiment with the service. Earlier this week I learned of a wonderful new data set, Canadian Federal Candidates: 1867-2017, by Semra Sevi, and I gave it a go.
This is admittedly very quick and dirty, but I'm pretty happy with it so far. I did some text manipulation with OpenRefine to take care of what was originally presented in CAPS, and I've actually done a bunch of normalization of the Occupation field, which deserves more exploration, but the original purpose of the data set seems to be to explore gender, so that's what I initially focused on too. Oh, and this is only showing those candidates who were elected, while the original data set includes candidates who didn't win election as well.
So you'll want to play around with the stuff in the pale yellow box to the right of the screen. The play button will move from the default of all data to showing data for each Parliament from 01 to 42. You'll want to choose Group by Gender and Shade by Gender, and then just play around with the other options to watch the data change. That's pretty much the whole reason I chose the Survey Response type visualization, because of all the flying changes ;-) It'll take a moment for the embed to load below...
I want to do some more data cleanup on the date fields, which may provide additional ways to show the data on a timeline. I also want to explore mapping the data - I think Flourish is expecting country names, but it should work at the Provincial level as well. TWT.
A couple of notes on the process with Flourish. I had a minor heart attack when I explored including a background image behind the visualization, and it seemed I couldn't get rid of it again. I ended up fixing it by uploading a new image (I had originally pointed to an online image), and once I'd done that I then was able to delete it from the box, but that wasn't an option when I was pointing to a web-hosted image.
I also wish there were some more options to customize the display, namely I couldn't figure out how to include a label on the slider, which is showing the Parliament number. I'd also love to insist that Flourish didn't show something when there was no data to show (like a Province that didn't exist before a certain year). Oh, and a way to set the default groupings and shadings would be nice too.
I might try to take some time to see how Tableau compares...
