Pick Up A Book And Read!
Introduction
During COVID-19, I have worked from home and decided to enroll in Data Visualization Nanodegree on Udacity because they provided the Financial Aid for me in November 2020 (discount 75%).
This article is the Capstone project of this course, Udacity asked the students to choose any datasets from MakeoverMonday and improve the Dashboard that already built using the dataset.
The Link to the dataset and article
Dataset:
https://data.world/makeovermonday/2020w38/workspace/data-dictionary
Article (already published Dashboard using this data):
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/en/web/products-eurostat-news/-/EDN-20200422-1
Inspiration
When I saw the Dashboard in the article, I thought multiple issues could be improved.
- The line chart colors didn’t look comfortable for the color blindness people because they choose green and red for this chart.
- The trend should be changed into the animation that attracts people and provides some interaction with them.
- I couldn’t drill down to the country level to see the book’s price compared to the consumer prices.
Explore Dataset
Collection:
- The dataset had a lot of dirty things. My goal here was to find the date column, so I found the date column limitation did not come in ready to use format.
- The dataset had a Data Collection Bias, so the key variable we have to use was missing in 693 rows (index_2015_100 which is the price of books).
Processing:
When I came to the Processing Bias, Outlier and Distribution bias does not make sense here. The key variable had many outliers value, both Lower and Higher, so I have to clean them before analysis.
Defining The Problem Statement
Selected this dataset, I would like to understand the relation of the trend of the book price and consumer price from the last two decades (2000–2020). These will help me to understand the value of books against other consumer products over time.
And I keep this for a hypothesis to understand the change of the importance of the books that will be reducing overtime when there is more consumer product that people can focus on in each country.
To answer this hypothesis I will be using a mixture of Tableau Dashboard and Animated Visualization using Flourish.
Dashboard
The dashboard will help us understand the trend and the popularity of the average index of books and consumer products from 2000 to 2020. And then, we can drill down to the performance of each country in the dataset.
The interactive dashboard can be selected only for books or consumer products and choose only countries you want to focus on.
Tableau Dashboard for desktop device Link (Please Maximize the Dashboard For a Better View).
From the dashboard above, you can see the average index trend over time from 2000 to 2020, including both books and consumer products by the line chart on the top. You can also find the distribution of both categories from the histogram chart on the bottom left.
There is a stacked bar chart to see the proportion of an average index for each country. Otherwise, the map chart represents an average index’s heatmap that you can quickly see which countries got the high average index. You can customize the data by choosing the filter control in the top right.
Insights
- An average index of books won the consumer products obviously from 2000 and slightly less in 2008 until 2018.
- In July 2008, There was the first won of the average index from consumer products.
- From 2011, the average index of the consumer products was growing up significantly.
- An average index of consumer products won from February 2018 onwards and the gap of them quite prominent.
- The popular index of consumer products is 100 to 101, but books’ popular index is around 89 to 105.
- The country that has the highest average index of consumer products and books is Switzerland (100.30 and 109.27 respectively).
Animated Graph To Understand The Change In Average Index of Books
- From 2002–2003, Ireland was in the top rank of books’ index and followed by Sweden.
- In 2004, Switzerland has the highest books’ index until 2010 and Ireland still maintains in the top 5. Greece came into the game in 2004 and climb to the highest rank instead of Switzerland in 2011
- New highest book index came in 2015, Turkey has the 1st rank until 2020 and has an all-time high as 175 books’ index.
Why My Dashboard is better?
- My dashboard is friendly for color-blind users because I avoid using red and green colors.
- My dashboard can drill down into the options like country and year-month so you can select what option that you only want to see.
- Animated Graph attracts users to see the trend of the books’ index.
