Quantifying my Self in a Viz

Hello All,

I found out about the Tableau Quantified Self Viz Contest a bit late in the day, and in a scenario eerily reminiscent to my uni days, started working on it the day before it was due, and stayed up late at night putting on the finishing touches.

I’m betting I’m up against some pretty talented individuals who have most likely been refining their viz for the last few weeks – so I’m not holding my breath just yet for a free ticket – and an on-stage iron viz performance at the Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle in Sept……but you never know.

Ever since I starting tapping my Opal Card at the train station, i’ve been curious to know what happens to all of my travel data – and have been meaning to get my hands on a download, and do some discovery.

So – when I saw the topic for this viz contest – I didn’t even have to think twice.

First a bit of copy paste from the opal.com.au website activity details screen (note to nsw gov – a download option would be smashing!), and then a wee bit of tidy-up.  Next I blended my data with latitude and longitude information for each train/ferry – thanks to this website..

I was disappointed to see that NSW gov only had the tap-on time for each journey.  Tap off-time would have given me some real travel time info.  Have a feeling that Sydney Trains would have been bit embarrassed by some of the shockingly slow trips I’ve been on lately – and have deliberately concealed this info.  Nonetheless, as I really wanted to do a vertical gant chart showing timeframes of trips to and from per day, I had to concoct some travel times.  I found that google maps did the job nicely of showing station to station travel times – which I added to my data blend.

A bit of Tableau calculated field magic, and a couple of hours later I had a good draft set of views to put onto a dashboard.

As I needed to tell a story and gain some insights, I added some point annotations, and calculated some insightful averages.

I must admit, I had been wondering whether it was cheaper to use the Opal card than it was to use my old weekly, and according to my Weeky Travel Costs viz  i’m about $10 a week in front – great news!!!

Here is a tableau public link to the viz I entered into the content – wish me luck!!!!

cheers

Craig