West Virginia State Salaries 2007-2015

This is part of my #1YearOfViz series! Check out the archive here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/p/one-year-of-dataviz.html

After seeing some work that I did with the University of Kentucky Salaries Viz my mom (who is a teacher at a local college) commented that she thought I should do the same thing with her college. I started looking and found that, unlike Kentucky, the salary records for ALL WV state employees were available all the way back until 2007!!! Yay historical data!

Me when I looked at the site and saw how much historical data there was!

Unfortunately unlike the other salary data I normally have I didn't have access to job titles so there's no way to really know if someone changed positions or anything... it's just name, department, and total compensation for that person per year. Of course with that, particularly given the amount of time... you can do neat things like figure out raise percentages over multiple years! Unfortunately the way the page is laid out that I extracted the data from you cannot look at an individual's salaries over time... so I fixed that with the viz! Below you can type in a name, or a department, and the viz will filter to show that person's salary/raises over time.

Additionally you can click on a particular department or name to have the data re-form to show just that particular set of data. Ie. You can click on the Division of Corrections, then click on Adkins, Lisa to reform the data specifically to show that user. Anyway I'm going to work on some other ways to present this data but in the meantime play around with the dashboard here:

Ultimately you have to remember that, even though it's Thanksgiving... you can't eat money. No matter what Ralph Wiggum tells you:

As always thanks for reading and if you enjoyed this visualization (viz) please share it out on your social networks. If you'd like access to the raw data that I scraped (by hand) from their site then you can download the raw data by clicking here.

The Inherent Racism of Election Years 2000-2015

This is part of my #1YearOfViz series! Check out the archive here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/p/one-year-of-dataviz.html

Better late than never right!? That's my thoughts on this week's post! I had a lot of life-related things happening recently and I haven't had the time to focus on data collection, ETL, etc as I'd hoped. Part of that was some personal things in my life and then I decided in the middle of the week to come to my hometown of Charleston, WV to spend some time with my dad post hip-replacement surgery.

Telling my dad not to do anything is IMPOSSIBLE.

I have something on-deck for next week that should be pretty big if I can find the time to get it done so that'll hopefully make up for the lack-luster few weeks of Viz!

So while looking around on my laptop I realized that I had WAY fewer datasets on here than I anticipated. I've been poking around a little more on Data.World lately and I saw a crosspost between there and /r/datasets about FBI statistics on hate crimes from 2000-2015 and thought with the given political climate this might make for a good viz. Sadly the 2016 data isn't in yet... it's probably gonna be a mess.

If you'd like to read up on what constitutes a "Hate Crime" according to the FBI they have a really great site located here.

You can see I just did the one Tableau Story for this viz as I think it's pretty logical to "step" through and isn't terribly interactive (sorry!). Check it out below:

I can't really think of too many things in the country that occur pretty cyclically every 4 years that could contribute to these pretty significant increases in trends. Of course the largest hate-crime related trend since it has been tracked starting in 2000 is the change in Anti-Islamic hate crimes that happened after 2001 (likely a result of 9/11/2001).

As always hit me up on twitter @wjking0 or via the comments below to talk about dataviz!

Video Game Music Viz - Part 1

This is part of my #1YearOfViz series! Check out the archive here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/p/one-year-of-dataviz.html

First let me apologize... for those readers not in the United States this was election week so everything's been a little.... let's use the word hectic around these parts. Secondly, I'm sick (see photo below) and was hoping Thursday/Friday I could really crunch though some data. That said... I didn't START crunching through the data until about 1AM Friday morning (you should be reading this on Friday hopefully).

Me sick in my comfy hoodie vizzing at 3AM.

I know what you're thinking....

Gotham... great show AMIRIGHT!?

The upshot of all this is to say that, due to various reasons, today's viz is going to be a little... thin. I still wanted to scrape and ETL some data for my readers but it's not nearly the level I'd LIKE to do with this data. If I can convince the awesome folks at Import.io to give me their top-tier plan for free I would be vizzing the shiz outta all kinds of stuff... but my feeble internet connection and their lack of support for their legacy application don't lend themselves to me doing 50,000+ queries anytime soon! That said Import.io's product is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE for data extraction! *bats eyes, looks for endorsement deal*

Today's data is my initial scrape from the Video Game Music Database which really is an exhaustive list of titles... of course most of which are in Japanese so I don't necessary know all the titles the music is referring to, it's impressive that their community has built something so rich! They even have a dedicated stats page that you can poke around in located here.

I found this through a podcast I listen to pretty regularly called the Legacy Music Hour featuring 8-bit and 16-bit era games.

This really isn't so much a comprehensive look at the data as it is a quick viz so I can stick to my schedule... that said....

I just did two dashboards... one which simply augments and simplifies their searching process to give you all results that you can scroll through and load by album title. It's nothing fancy but you can use it to total up things to compare how many game soundtracks Sonic has had to Mario, etc.

This next one shows the trends in the video game music industry over the last several years. Unfortunately game sales data is hard to come by (if anyone knows a source please let me know). The height being in the late 2000's around 2009 or so with a dip after that. I kinda wonder that, like with gaming, VGM reached a saturation point where people had more than they could reasonably listen to or enjoy?

I also filtered the early days of VGM and limited it to 1983+ (which you can edit with the filter-slider) because I felt that really the explosion of game music came when the Famicom hit Japan in 1983. You can see this reflected

I promise you all next week I'll unveil something worthwhile when I'm feeling less like poop for a zillion reasons! In the meantime ... at least I'm keeping my schedule of 1 Viz per Week! I do have the scrape started for the deep dive into this data and I'll likely plow through that and get it published in a week or two from now (probably 2 as I don't like to put two similar topics published back-to-back). Hit me up on Twitter @wjking0 or leave a comment below and tell me what you thought!

Me with this week's viz.

$25,000 Dollar Prop, Mascots with Guns, and other fun things in a Halloween Express Scrape!

This is part of my #1YearOfViz series! Check out the archive here: http://bourbonandbrains.blogspot.com/p/one-year-of-dataviz.html

I'll provide visualizations however some of my initial findings are as follows: 

• Some assumptions you would make are accurate, such as plus size costumes tend to be more expensive I considerable amount (28.60% more expensive on average).
• Interestingly enough plus size costumes tend to be cheaper when they are classified as "sexy" (18.18% cheaper!).
• There are also just about equal percentages of sexy plus-sized costumes as sexy non-plus size costumes (12.12% Plus vs 16.07% Non-Plus).

Thanks to my friend Barbie I thought it would be a good idea to look at Children vs Adult costumes to see which had more. I would assume more children costume exist than adults costumes, as it turns out there are considerably more adult costumes than children's costumes! The assumption could be that people tend to make children's costumes or children's costumes simply require make-up and accessories (which does make up more than 30% of the total items in the Halloween express store).

Also the assumption that women costume cost more than men's costumes is incorrect men's costumes cost more by approximately 20% and there are approximately 20% fewer men's costumes as women's costumes. This may be a result on pricing vs demand. Just guessing that possibly women's costumes are sold more frequently so can ultimately be priced lower.

I would say I'm sorry for all the Mean Girls gifs... but nah.

Since gender of costume isn't specifically stated in every case I did a little formula, I just wanted to give you a quick note on how I defined gender in this data. If any of the categories or the item title or item subtitle contain the word "women" or "girl" then I defined it as 'Female' and "boy" or "men" then I classified it as a 'Male' costume.

Anyway here's the data that I just mentioned! It's not really meant to be "played with" but don't worry the next viz below this factual story viz will be more interactive!

Now as promised I wanted to put some individual links to things in here that I just found horrifying:

• Basically the ENTIRE "Mascots" Category but most specifically this gem. He's a "Patriot" mascot... with a shotgun. Not sure what Mascot carries heat.... but ya never know.
• The $25,000 PROP.... which really just scratches the surface of expensive things for sale at Halloween Express. You can play around below with the full dataset and set it to $1,000+ on the filter and you can see HOW many crazy items there are in there!

I've been a little distracted lately so I promise a better and more deep dive into some data next week! As always hit me up on Twitter @wjking0 or in the comments below if you have questions/comments/concerns!

I'm OUT!