Wedding Tracker Map
About the Visualization
Context: The purpose of this visualization was to get to know a new tool, Flourish Studio. In order to have a published product within a few days, I chose to use a toy dataset with information familiar to me: the dates and locations of the 44 weddings I have attended since college, information which—as the child of two CPAs—I long ago decided to track in a spreadsheet “just in case.” The animated map below shows the weddings in the order they happened, with a different colored dot for different categories of relationships such as college friends, cousins, or people I met after moving back to Seattle as an adult. It also tallies up the count of weddings by category using the “Rate” and “Total” aggregations.
Using Flourish: Flourish was pretty intuitive to learn and has a base of powerful, if somewhat rigid, free templates. The tooltips worked much the same as any visualization platform, and I learned how to set a geographic centroid and default zoom rather than starting at a global view. I also used the timeline feature to show the 44 weddings in a 44-second animation. Watching it through really highlights the long gap between weddings due to covid. My next step (already underway) is to use the software development kit, Flourish SDK, to develop my own template that addresses some of the limitations I ran up against in the template I used. The most glaring was not being able to build a “counter” (tally) chart for more than one dimension at a time—for example, relationship to me, whether I traveled for the wedding or not, and my role in the wedding.
Additional Links: Setting an initial viewport in maps | Flourish SDK Intro Resources | “Introduction to the SDK” Webinar